The TSA's FAST Personality Screening Program Violates the Fourth Amendment [pdf]
aulawreview.org
aulawreview.org
The actual analysis starts at 367. The gist of the argument, from a quick read, is that Kyllo (the case that held that the government could not use infrared cameras to look into peoples' homes) established that the government could not use extrasensory searches to get information about what's inside areas protected by the 4th amendment. To the extent that biological vitals and medical information are protected (an uncontroversial point), it follows that using extrasensory technology to obtain that information violates Kyllo.
Now I imagine that most ways to get vitals would be pretty intrusive and require non-common (as in, not in use by everyday people) hardware, but generally speaking Kyllo only invalidates a certain class of instrument
The system has an eighty-one percent classification accuracy
in a laboratory test setting
It sounds good until you realize that bad guys are an infinitesimal portion of the population.
If bad guys are 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 100,000, virtually all of the people implicated by the system will be innocent.
EVM info: http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/
Yet, I'm not a terrorist. And you know what? most people aren't terrorists. The false positive rate so high it essentially makes the test meaningless and unable to discern an actual threat.
Polygraph tests are notoriously inaccurate - where as for something like terrorist threats the number of real positives you are interested is probably in the x > 1/10^6.
That's totally fantastic - consider that pregnancy tests have a false positive rate in the single digits.
Now this FAST thing anyhow, sounds insane. I will assume it just doesn't work and isn't going to be a Problem. But really, you would want to be able to stop it or put better bounds on it.
But from what I can tell, you can only sue to stop something after it has already harmed you, not just because it could cause future harm. You have to show damages to even be heard. So, how can you show damages until after it's already built and deployed?
But we'll nicely violate your 4th amendment rights, it's OK!
> And I've found TSA agents are much more interested in getting you through security, than holding you up in security.
Which is why the assign 1 person to the first class line. 1 person to the pre check line. and 1 person to the 4 normal lines. and then have 4 people standing around doing absolutely nothing. The TSA (as an org, not as individuals) is concerned with making money for large political contributors and keeping people afraid.
> But really, you would want to be able to stop it or put better bounds on it.
But really, I want to stop everything that's happened because it's all been insane, completely unhelpful, and worth exactly $0 of the billions we've spent on it.
> So, how can you show damages until after it's already built and deployed?
By having enough people who actually care and are politically active enough to be very loud when things like this happen. Senators and Representatives need to know that their constitutes won't stand for it.
In short, the same techniques don't apply to this TSA tech and so I doubt it works.
Yes, you can do heart rate stuff, but many medications affect that tremendously, you can do temperature stuff via IR video, but that is also super error prone. Just running to grab your flight, a perfectly reasonable thing to do at an airport, would trip every alarm in the building. Your gait would be off, your temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, eye dilation.
The issue is that humans come in an incredible array and variety of conditions. Even if you could take a baseline for every person that would ever want to fly before they got to the airport in a sterile room, the data would be useless by flight #10. This is leaving aside the tremendous human rights issues, engineering, and cost factors.
That said, computers are getting better and better at this every day, so the feasibility is there, it is just that you have to do tracking on an unheard of scale and on a day to day running basis across every single person on the planet. The disease and medical applications are the way to get it 'passed' (whatever governing body that may be), not the TSA.
You reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back, Leon.
The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can't. Not with out your help. But you're not helping.
I mean you're not helping! Why is that, Leon?
I felt less hassled and assaulted going from Jordan to Israel and at Ben Gurion this December. That says something.
http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2010/11/24/politicians-st...
I like the transparency, but doing it manually every time seems like it could become a bit of a hassle for you.
I read the whole paper (sans footnotes) and it makes a lot of sense. Had I not also read the legal memo on extra-judicial assassinations, I'd be a lot more confident that an average person could predict court decisions based on the current body of law and precedent. But I think any decision can be reached, at least in practical effect, considering the power to dismiss cases and exclude evidence.
Of course, this requires public scrutiny to work. Hence the problems with secret legal memos and secret court opinions.
That said, I am not sure any searching done by the TSA can violate the 4th amendment - you can always refuse a search if you're ok with being ejected from the airport.