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We tested Europe’s new lie detector for travelers and triggered a false positive

226 points by rchaudhary 7y ago

lazyguy2 7y ago
Wow. What a horrorshow. Humans operating lie detecting machines with personal interviews has yet to rise above the standard of 'Mostly used to bullshit and intimidate suspects', but these clowns think they can use facial recognition to detect lying? What a huge scam. I don't know what conman dreamt this up, but to convince multiple governments to go along with it he has to be good. Maybe it's time to resurrect the Canadian Fruit machine project and get some idiot in the EU government to finance it. Except instead of detecting 'gayness' it detects 'Terrorist thoughts'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_machine_(homosexuality_test) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_machine_(homosexuality_t...
- jstummbillig 7y ago
  I am so confused. There seems to be a blatantly obvious method to find out how well this machine works, no anecdotes or trust required: You get a decent amount of test subjects to dry run it in a controlled environment. Has this not been done? If not, why? Or am I wrong in believing it's that simple?
  - function_seven 7y ago
    To the extent they work at all, lie detectors only do so if the person telling the lie has a real reason to lie. Skin in the game, high stakes, and real harm if their deception is uncovered. Having a controlled environment to test this is really hard. You can't just have someone say, "My mother is 35" when their mother is really 53. That's a silly lie, and can be told with the same level of calmness as the truth. So how do you design an experiment with "real" liars (telling non-trivial lies), while knowing which participants are lying or not?
    - floatboth 7y ago
      False positives are more concerning here than false negatives. It should be obvious to everyone that way way more people are "not calm" for reasons other than lying!
      - sib 7y ago
        That's an interesting point of view. If some hypothetical "bad guys" are trying to set off a series of tactical nuclear weapons, false negatives are actually pretty bad. (Yes, I actually am a small-l libertarian and have a strong aversion to overbearing and stupidly-designed government programs, which this one certainly seems to be.)
        XorNot 7y ago
        I mean if you have access to tactical nukes though, why are you even bothering to get on a plane in Europe?
      - function_seven 7y ago
        Yeah. My "to the extent..." preamble represents my feeling on polygraphs and lie detectors in general. The entire situation of being strapped into a machine and asked invasive questions is going to be nervous-making. And depending on which questions are asked, and how they're asked, the examiner can easily contaminate the exam and extract a false positive.
    - mos_basik 7y ago
      Maybe you could induce something similar by providing the liar with strong incentives / stress. Something like this: >We're going to hook you up to a state-of-the-art polygraph. We know you've heard that polygraphs are snake oil, but we think we've made a breakthrough on this one, which is why we're running this test. Answer truthfully to all questions except the five on this shortlist. For any of listed questions, you may choose to lie. If you tell one undetected lie, you get $5. For each additional undetected lie, your payoff is multiplied by 1.9. If any of your lies is detected, you get no money and you get shocked. The intensity of the shock has a similar exponential relationship with the number of lies you told. If shocking volunteers doesn't get past the ethics committee, then maybe you start off the volunteers with a baseline payout of $50 or so and allow the payoff to both grow and decrease exponentially. The goal being that on that fifth lie, they're really on the edge, knowing that they could either make a lot of money or get {shocked,nothing}.
  - harry8 7y ago
    Where are you finding terrorist who think they are getting away with concealing it?
  - jbob2000 7y ago
    The purpose of these machines isn’t to actually work as intended. These machines are here for plausible deniability: “we pulled you aside because the machine said so, not because you’re Muslim”.
    - droithomme 7y ago
      Or the computer said he was lying about not being a terrorist, so we went to arrest him but he was not cooperative and violently resisted, which of course is what a terrorist would do, and thus we had no choice but to shoot and kill him. In self defense of course and to protect the public. This is OK because the computer determined he was a terrorist and computers don't make mistakes.
  - mcherm 7y ago
    > Has this not been done? No, this has not been done. > If not, why? Because it would fail. > Or am I wrong in believing it's that simple? Nope... it's that simple. But let's be honest here: we SHOULD use this approach for ALL of these kinds of assessment, yet we don't. Even in the US, we use things like fingerprint matching, handwriting analysis, drug testing laboratories, DNA analysis, dog sniffs for drugs and so forth in legal cases yet we don't perform independent blinded tests of the accuracy of these tools.
    - sli 7y ago
      Don't forget hair analysis. And out of all of those, the only one that actually works is DNA analysis and even that fails from time to time due to how easily samples can be contaminated.
      - ergothus 7y ago
        My understanding is that DNA is basically unique, but the patterns use for conventional DNA analysis are not. While they may be statistically close enough to unique to trust over the whole population, there have been different issues when you start scoping things to different racial groups or areas with smaller gene pools (not dangerously small, just smaller). Because actually sequencing and comparing someones entire DNA would be prohibitively expensive if done for every case, they just look for a set of markers and assume that a large enough collection is close enough without accounting for distribution patterns of those markers AMONG THE SAMPLE POPULATION. (e.g. you don't have to look hard in small towns or in populations of the same heritage to notice a lot of physical characteristics that are quite common in that sub-population while being pretty distinct in the human population at large, the same is true for these markers.) . Since crimes often involve suspects from the same location and/or racial profile, a rule that is pretty reliable for the earth is not so reliable for this town/community/group of suspects. So the science is a problem even before you get to human error. The odds of a false match take hits of multiple orders of magnitude. Note: I'm not qualified to speak on the topic, but I've followed the topic with interest at a layman level for a while - be glad to hear from someone who IS qualified to speak on it to shed more light on why I'm right/wrong.
  - Analemma_ 7y ago
    > Has this not been done? If not, why? I'm no libertarian, but I will concede that this is a perfect example of libertarian griping about government spending: it's not getting done because no one has any incentive for it to get done. Does the manufacturer have any incentive to honestly test the machine? Hell no, then no one would buy it. Does the government have any incentive to honestly test the machine? No, because airport/customs security is security theater and their goal is convincing voters that "something is being done". (Voters might have an incentive to honestly test the machine, but it's more-or-less impossible for this preference to affect policy, unless huge numbers of people become single-issue voters about security device testing. Which isn't likely.) Do the operators have any incentive to honestly test the machine? No, because if a terrorist slips through the machine and then blows up a plane, none of the blame comes back to the individual officer who ran the test. Without any incentive for the machine to work, it's no surprise that it doesn't.
  - Iv 7y ago
    Questions asked by the EU parliament: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-005624_EN.html http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-005624... Answer: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-005624-ASW_EN.html http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-005624... Apparently it has been tested, has been shown to have statistically significant result. As of November 2018 it was not used nor planned to be used on enforcing any border control, but was tested at three borders in real conditions. Even a good system would have false positives. In itself, that does not invalidate the whole system, even if I think the whole premise of this project is very shaky.
    - roenxi 7y ago
      Being statistically significant is nowhere near a high enough bar for this sort of quackery. Statistical significance is gameable, doesn't carry information about type I and II errors and frankly just means there is at least 1 common case that the machine gets right. People shouldn't be given or denied opportunity because a magic machine likes them. This machine will be like a human - it will develop a bizarre set of biases and one of them will happen to be correlated with reality. It could be producing about as much evidence as someone guessing that Arabs are Muslim - grossly stupid, statistically significant results.
      - Iv 7y ago
        Honestly at 4.5m that's a marginal project that is unlikely to be used anywhere seriously. And the EU answers makes it clear it will never take decisions alone. You know, there has been a bit weird push by brexit promoters for "frictionless" borders relying on magic tech. I suspect the funding of this could come from there. Expect it to not go anywhere once the brexit mess is over
  - nyolfen 7y ago
    the point isn't detecting lies, the point is pressure to confess during interrogations. what matters is whether the person being interrogated thinks it works -- or even if they don't, to make lying more stressful.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Reminds me of this device: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 Tens of millions of dollars worth of dowsing rods.
- ipsa 7y ago
  The fruit machine was reincarnated for pedosexuals: a device attached to their genitals measures if they get sexual arousal from pictures of children. Those that do are not deemed ready for rehabilitation. Where most people yell scam or digital phrenology, I have a somewhat contrarian view: These systems do work. It is possible to tell, better than random guessing, if someone is gay or has a violent disposition, with just a single picture. Prisons for violent crimes see way more inmates that are bald, bearded, acned, square-jawed (signs of high testosterone). Replicated studies have shown that the profile pictures of gay men are significantly different from straight men, from subtle effects, such as more attention to grooming, to more physically noticable, like shape of the jaw being more rounded. I have no reason to disbelief that an automated system could check for tell-tale signs that someone is hiding something: needing a lot of time to answer basic questions, using their lead hand to cover their chin, looking not in the direction commonly associated with recall, but that of imagination, trembling voice, anxious eye twitches, etcetera. This is what flawed human border guards are already doing. Isreal has the most advanced airport security and trains European and American border guards to detect suspicious behavior. The TSA has over 3000 behavior detection agents. These are people with their own political and religious beliefs, prejudices, and variance -- and they can't be audited rigorously. We just never heard the accuracy, so we can't say if lie detectors can beat this (or can help as a human tool). But I bet they can. I was dissapointed that the actual video chat with the journalist and the digital border guard was not included in the investigative article. They argue that the system be interpretable, but give no full transparency themselves. I'd trust that she did not tell any lies, but I don't trust that they did not try to game/fool the system, as to have an actual article to write about. Anyway, using just one test subject is majorly flawed, and comes close to not understanding that science can't provide 100% accurate predictions, just probabilities. I feel it is a reasoning flaw to discard any automated system, by honing in on a single mistake.
  - bauerd 7y ago
    Please do provide sources for all these claims
    - ipsa 7y ago
      Measuring sexual arousal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penile_plethysmograph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penile_plethysmograph & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_for_Paedophiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_for_Paedophiles Testosterone effects on face structure and violent crime: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/019188699400177T https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/019188... & https://www.healthline.com/health/low-testosterone/effects-on-body https://www.healthline.com/health/low-testosterone/effects-o... On deep nets having better gaydars than average human: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspa0000098 https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspa0000098 & https://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1036.full https://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1036.full On AVATAR (the US version of the digital border guard: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/15/lie-detectors-with-artificial-intelligence-are-future-of-border-security.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/15/lie-detectors-with-artificia... & https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563218304485?via=ihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756321... On Isreal airport security and training EU and American border agents: https://www.aerotime.aero/aerotime.team/19886-detecting-anomalies-why-israeli-airport-security-works https://www.aerotime.aero/aerotime.team/19886-detecting-anom... & https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-israeli-airport-secu_b_4978149 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-israeli-airport-secu_b_4... On 100% accuracy being impossible: https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atmospheric/scientists-predict-weather.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atm... & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem
- romwell 7y ago
  >Wow. What a horrorshow. You viddy, it was a very, very horrorshow machine, for it made all those vecks ittying across the border go bezoomny trying to figure out what litso to make to keep the machine like happy. It was, oh my brothers, on purpose, as to make these vecks to not want to try do that again. The bratchnies at the top must have loved it. [1] [1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:A_Clockwork_Orange https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:A_Clockwork_Orange
- petre 7y ago
  A waste of EU taxpayer money, that's for sure.
cgrealy 7y ago
A “lie detector”? Seriously? If you’re going to put people through this kind of system, you should have some solid science to back it up and as far as I can see, this is just some bargain basement ML agent.
s5ma6n 7y ago
It sounds like a story we have heard so many times. A sense of false security enforced by fear of terror and a system that does not work correctly. Looks like now it's the turn for European citizens to lose all their privacy and have the remaining of their data to be collected. Very unfortunate.
mc32 7y ago
At least they could use something like what has been used in India[1] (though many jurisdictions forbid its usage), at least there is some science behind it. However, because it’s science based and not just a bunch of “woo”, it has the inherent danger of being ”incontrovertible”. Kinda like DNA,but obviously flawed none the less. [1]http://theconversation.com/if-a-brain-can-be-caught-lying-should-we-admit-that-evidence-to-court-heres-what-legal-experts-think-80263 http://theconversation.com/if-a-brain-can-be-caught-lying-sh...
- eth0up 7y ago
  My golly - the havoc that beast would wreak if applied to all officials! It would almost be worth unleashing on the public, if perfected from the top down. Though it never seems to work that way. I'm already lucidly envisioning future politicians murmuring very nervously through federally issued mandatory truth helmets.
  - cwkoss 7y ago
    I would love to see presidential debates where each candidate is hooked up to an EEG polygraph-type device. Might not work on psychopaths though.
    - eth0up 7y ago
      Realistically, I truly wonder if the consummate versions of such tech won't become the keystone of the future world's pyrrhic utopia. In some paved global labyrinth of potted plants, designer integrity and perfect safety, where lies are only fiction of the past and dissidence is a vestigial dead synapse in the collective mind.
throw9879879 7y ago
Unreliable junk like lie detectors are used on purpose. Random reinforcement simply ups the fear the peasants have of the system. Which is the intended result; who cares if a few innocent people get chopped up in the process.
switch007 7y ago
> Currently, the lie detector test is voluntary Who the hell opts in to that? > A spokesperson for iBorderCtrl declined to answer questions for this story. Oh, they don't have anything to hide, do they? Before scrolling down I knew the UK would be involved somehow. They must do anything except admit that their continous meddling (to put it mildly) in the middle east incites retaliation.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Who the hell opts in to that? I can imagine someone being manipulated into opting in. The old “if you cooperate we can quickly get you on your way” type of thing.
- Accacin 7y ago
  That's not entirely fair, it's in the UK it's a "EU research program has pumped some 4.5 million euros into the project, which is being managed by a consortium of 13 partners, including Greece’s Center for Security Studies, Germany’s Leibniz University Hannover, and technology and security companies like Hungary’s BioSec, Spain’s Everis, and Poland’s JAS."
  - switch007 7y ago
    I didn't say the UK was exclusively involved, did I? > IBorderCtrl’s lie detection system was developed in England by researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University I.e. the system which is the subject of the article?
- gowld 7y ago
  Unfortunately, "voluntary" doesn't mean "opt-in", it means "Technically there are hoops you can jump through, costing time and/or money, to avoid it"
noident 7y ago
Working as designed: a smokescreen for arbitrary interrogation and denial of groups that border agents don't like. Everybody else that fails the test gets the benefit of the doubt. 75% accuracy is exactly useless, and I find it hard to believe it beats random chance anyway. More racism packed into black box quackery.
jmvoodoo 7y ago
This is begging for a deepfakes-style adversarial system.
ckemere 7y ago
One of the big challenges with software to detect lies is getting good training data. I would be suspicious of anything that wasn't trained using actual data from the particular domain that it was going to be used in. So maybe the best that can be said for this effort is that for the first few years they should ideally report scores that are actually just random (but not tell the actual border agents this, obviously) until they get enough data to train a reasonable classifier. I wouldn't be surprised if this is what is actually being done.
gherkinnn 7y ago
How is this real? > Travelers who are deemed dangerous can be denied entry, though in most cases they would never know if the avatar test had contributed to such a decision. Jesus fuck. Denied entry because the clowns who thought this face[0] is a good idea inadvertently screwed up somewhere else. Slaves to the algorithm. Disgusting. Takes diffusion of responsibility to a whole new level. > iBorderCtrl Why? Seriously. Clowns confirmed. > A study produced by the researchers in Manchester tested iBorderCtrl on 32 people [...] 75 percent accuracy [...] unbalanced in terms of ethnicity and gender. I’d bet a decent lunch that these dummies tested it on themselves. It’s like QA-ing my own stuff. That one path I implemented works fine. What do you mean there are other ways? I’ll add a dessert to said lunch if the accuracy of a representative sample is better than a dice roll. > this face [0] > An EU research program has pumped some 4.5 million euros into the project Kewl. I can think of many ways this could be spent more productively. Like setting it aflame and frying up some bacon. [0] https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2019/07/guard-photo-1000-1564076275.jpg https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2019/07/gu...
- khuey 7y ago
  It doesn't seem that much different than being denied entry because of the country you were born in. Borders are full of arbitrary decisions.
  - campfireveteran 7y ago
    Isn't that an equivocation/conflation of differently bad things? Shouldn't border control optimize risk management based primarily on wise human intelligence on-the-ground supported by reliable or at least reliability-qualified data that doesn't hassle people any more than is absolutely necessary? For example, in the US (not the EU), the number of secret databases and watch lists that feed into current border control decision-making is absolutely frightening (per whistleblower revelations).
  - dependenttypes 7y ago
    One is deterministic and you can easily avoid a 7 hour travel if you know that a country rejects people from your country while the other not so much.
rootusrootus 7y ago
Ha, for once this kind of insanity is happening in Europe instead of the US.
p0llard 7y ago
> Manchester Metropolitan University As a Brit, I can confirm that this is most certainly not a well respected institution; the UK has some of the best universities in the world, but this is not one of them.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  Well it depends, all the UK universities have strengths and weaknesses. In some cases there are straight up practical reasons. Years ago my university's chip fab caught fire and burned to the ground, because chip fabs do that sometimes, and obviously that significantly reduced the ability to expose students to practical skills in a clean room and so on. But most UK universities don't have a chip fab at all, which means they don't have academic staff who need one, which means undergraduates are also not getting classes with people who have that knowledge at the front. MMU has a bunch of expertise in subjects like textile making and some practical engineering disciplines, where as I wouldn't necessarily regard some of the UK's more famous universities as good on those subjects.
  - p0llard 7y ago
    Soton is in an entirely different league to MMU. Textile making isn't an academic discipline, and historically would not have been taught at a university at all. If you want high quality academic research and rigour, you're far more likely to find it somewhere other than MMU. This is an unfortunate truth, but a truth nonetheless.
    - tialaramex 7y ago
      It's definitely true that "historically" textile making wouldn't have been taught at a university. Sure looks like a real academic discipline to me though, at least as much as say, law (maritime law being another of Soton's specialities) or indeed electronics. It so happens our culture prizes knowledge of electronics very highly and the development of new textiles much less so, but it could be otherwise.
neiman 7y ago
It is: - Inaccurate (surely, since real lie detectors are) - Does more harm than help - Humiliating - Will not stop any real threat - Looks like something of a dystopian film We shouldn't automate human interactions. We shouldn't automate social stuff. You automate mechanical things which are clear, not the delicate inaccurate job of a human to tell if another human is suspicious or not.
rhn_mk1 7y ago
What can EU citizens do to indicate this is unwelcome?
- icebraining 7y ago
  Seems some people are trying to answer that question: https://iborderctrl.no/act https://iborderctrl.no/act
raverbashing 7y ago
While this system is hard to defend, it is still in test and it's possible it will never go into production. Less BS than a polygraph maybe? > Our reporter — the first journalist to test the system before crossing the Serbian-Hungarian border earlier this year — provided honest responses to all questions but was deemed to be a liar by the machine, with four false answers out of 16 and a score of 48. He might have answered them truthfully, but if he tried (or even unintentionally acted) to influence the perception of the answers is not known.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Regardless of how good it is, do you really want to be told where you can or cannot travel by a machine? Call me an egotist but I think of myself as better than cargo.
  - raverbashing 7y ago
    No, I don't. But that already happens unfortunately.
anigbrowl 7y ago
Why would anyone in their right mind contribute to or cooperate with such a project?
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
Meanwhile, we aren't far removed from the year when image recognition confused black people and gorillas. Who would ever roll this out thinking that we've made such progress since then that we can tell such nuances as lies or truth? And they still didn't balance the training set with regard to ethnicity and gender?? What a shit show. You can bet your ass that it has higher false positives for some group or other.
throwaway40000 7y ago
This is an horizon 2020 project. This is an EU program that distributes money to groups of companies + research institutions to do some research. The funding is usually a few millions over a few years. The requirements on the delivery are very lax. Basically you can get away with doing nothing useful, after all it’s research and you can’t be penalized for not finding anything, as long you show you did what you said you would try you’re ok. The commission requires the projects to have a validation part, what is described in the article is probably exactly that. Having worked in such projects the money is sometimes completely wasted. There is a whole cottage industry dedicated in bidding and executing these projects, it survives just out of the research funding and they are expert in meeting the commission requirements instead of being expert in the subject matter. Sometimes I have the feeling part of this money is a way for EU to keep some engineers busy in the poor parts of the continent, some times I feel it’s just soft corruption (reviews are often also reviewees), but for sure some project are scientifically horrible: this one looks to be one of those. That being said some projects are also nice, for instance Firefox is going to merge a web page translator which was produced by another h2020 project. The program as a whole is most probably a positive contribution to society as a whole. It’s like VC money for public research, many projects are a disaster but some are very good and make the endeavor worth.
- throwaway40000 7y ago
  ... one of the KPIs that are used to measure success is the number of press articles about the project :)
- antpls 7y ago
  There never is a guarantee of result in R&D, and a few millions isnt much compared to the trillion budget of EU. However the goal of this project, with ethical concerns, is worrying
aiyodev 7y ago
The lied detector was invented by the creator of the Wonder Woman comic after he noticed his wife's blood pressure rose when she was angry. It gained widespread adoption after he made commercials for Gillette to "prove" that their razors were superior to the competition. It's wacky comic book technology that doesn't work. It only appears to work because it tricks people into confessing to crimes. Why stop at the lie detector? Why not have a block of kryptonite at every airport to protect them from attacks by Zod? Why not give every cop a batarang? It's insane that we still allow our governments to spend our tax dollars on this.
outworlder 7y ago
> IBorderCtrl’s lie detection system was developed in England by researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University, who say that the technology can pick up on “micro gestures” Aren't "micro-expressions" pseudoscience? Furthermore, AI based micro-expression "detector" sounds even more like snake oil.
gowld 7y ago
> Ray Bull [...] told The Intercept that the iBorderCtrl project was “not credible” What an aptonym!
Krasnol 7y ago
Describe in single words, only the good things that come in to your mind about... your mother.
z-10 7y ago
Glory to Arstotzka
zizee 7y ago
Ignoring the fact that this doesn't work, can you imagine if you could accurately detect someone is lying with devices that everyone carries with them? Just imagine the power that such a technology a totalitarian government could wield using this. Jethro's phone beeped incessantly to remind him that he had not completed his patriot assessment in the last 24 hours. He groaned internally, and even though he was running late for work he decided that he had better take the 5 minutes to complete the test. He couldn't afford to lose any more social credit points this month. Opening the app, he could see his face in the top corner of the screen to help him know the camera was centered on his face, not that he really needed this after doing the assessment almost daily since his 10th birthday. The first question flashed onto the screen, "Have you committed any crimes in the last 24 hours"
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Just imagine the power that such a technology a totalitarian government could wield using this. Just imagine the power of the people in a crowd pointing them at a politician making a speech.
  - zizee 7y ago
    I imagine there has been many a time with someone making a hateful speech where they believe every word that they are saying (regardless of whether are right or not). Politicians are also masters of speech where they are technically correct, they sound like they are saying one thing, but remain evasive/non-committal.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    Such a crowd would select skilled liars and sociopaths to lead them. Wait..
- campfireveteran 7y ago
  A manager in the border security apparatus with no real-world experience sold their managers on technology solutions to human intelligence problems, and the higher-ups drooled at all the salary and hourly employee money they could divert to their pet projects and pyramidal fiefdoms.
I_am_tiberius 7y ago
Sounds dystopian. Somehow we seem to have moved to a parallel universe. I thought Europe is the last safe place on earth.
jupp0r 7y ago
Even if this worked with high accuracy, it’s pure base rate fallacy [1] to assume it would have any practical usefulness beyond security theater. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
dabbledash 7y ago
Good. A version of this that actually worked would be a lot more horrifying. After all, the problem with oppressive governments isn’t usually “accuracy.”
campfireveteran 7y ago
Does it come with a coupon for the Kafkaesque social credit system patterned on China that isn't far behind it?
chiph 7y ago
There's no way I'm installing software like this on my computer. They already snoop through your phone when you pass through border control, I'm not assisting them in their data collection efforts by granting them access via an install.
anonymouswacker 7y ago
Regardless of how stupid, wrong, and dangerous this is, it or something just as useless will crop up because government can easily justify wasting money when "your safety" is at stake.
monksy 7y ago
They expect people to take that fake "official" seriously? If I go up to it.. what's stopping me from having it take a picture of my junk or telling that it can sod off?
antpls 7y ago
> IBorderCtrl’s lie detection system was developed in England by researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University, who say that the technology can pick up on “micro gestures” a person makes while answering questions on their computer, analyzing their facial expressions, gaze, and posture. As an European, I don't even know how that project obtained funds from EU. Even if it "worked", it's the opposite of the future I would like to build. I suspect this project will never be implemented full-scale, and is only for research on human emotions understanding. This project should be reviewd by more journalists, because very few Europeans know their taxes are used for that kind of anti-humanitarian projects and they should be informed about it
sammorrowdrums 7y ago
Released a paper that suggested "75% accuracy on 35 people" with admission of bias in the test set participant make-up. Sounds like the confidence interval would be very poor. This is exactly like all those other studies that found an effect in a small sample but didn't use basic statistics to realise what kind of sample size they would need to actually prove an effect. Nor (if I can tell) was there any acknowledgement about the fact that asking normal people to lie and trying to observe a hardened criminal / fundamentalist is not the same. I worked on something with an ex-chief of the flying squad who said that there is a huge difference.

226 points by rchaudhary 7y ago

Wow. What a horrorshow. Humans operating lie detecting machines with personal interviews has yet to rise above the standard of 'Mostly used to bullshit and intimidate suspects', but these clowns think they can use facial recognition to detect lying? What a huge scam. I don't know what conman dreamt this up, but to convince multiple governments to go along with it he has to be good. Maybe it's time to resurrect the Canadian Fruit machine project and get some idiot in the EU government to finance it. Except instead of detecting 'gayness' it detects 'Terrorist thoughts'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_machine_(homosexuality_test) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_machine_(homosexuality_t...

jstummbillig 7y ago
I am so confused. There seems to be a blatantly obvious method to find out how well this machine works, no anecdotes or trust required: You get a decent amount of test subjects to dry run it in a controlled environment. Has this not been done? If not, why? Or am I wrong in believing it's that simple?
- function_seven 7y ago
  To the extent they work at all, lie detectors only do so if the person telling the lie has a real reason to lie. Skin in the game, high stakes, and real harm if their deception is uncovered. Having a controlled environment to test this is really hard. You can't just have someone say, "My mother is 35" when their mother is really 53. That's a silly lie, and can be told with the same level of calmness as the truth. So how do you design an experiment with "real" liars (telling non-trivial lies), while knowing which participants are lying or not?
  - floatboth 7y ago
    False positives are more concerning here than false negatives. It should be obvious to everyone that way way more people are "not calm" for reasons other than lying!
    - sib 7y ago
      That's an interesting point of view. If some hypothetical "bad guys" are trying to set off a series of tactical nuclear weapons, false negatives are actually pretty bad. (Yes, I actually am a small-l libertarian and have a strong aversion to overbearing and stupidly-designed government programs, which this one certainly seems to be.)
      - XorNot 7y ago
        I mean if you have access to tactical nukes though, why are you even bothering to get on a plane in Europe?
    - function_seven 7y ago
      Yeah. My "to the extent..." preamble represents my feeling on polygraphs and lie detectors in general. The entire situation of being strapped into a machine and asked invasive questions is going to be nervous-making. And depending on which questions are asked, and how they're asked, the examiner can easily contaminate the exam and extract a false positive.
  - mos_basik 7y ago
    Maybe you could induce something similar by providing the liar with strong incentives / stress. Something like this: >We're going to hook you up to a state-of-the-art polygraph. We know you've heard that polygraphs are snake oil, but we think we've made a breakthrough on this one, which is why we're running this test. Answer truthfully to all questions except the five on this shortlist. For any of listed questions, you may choose to lie. If you tell one undetected lie, you get $5. For each additional undetected lie, your payoff is multiplied by 1.9. If any of your lies is detected, you get no money and you get shocked. The intensity of the shock has a similar exponential relationship with the number of lies you told. If shocking volunteers doesn't get past the ethics committee, then maybe you start off the volunteers with a baseline payout of $50 or so and allow the payoff to both grow and decrease exponentially. The goal being that on that fifth lie, they're really on the edge, knowing that they could either make a lot of money or get {shocked,nothing}.
- harry8 7y ago
  Where are you finding terrorist who think they are getting away with concealing it?
- jbob2000 7y ago
  The purpose of these machines isn’t to actually work as intended. These machines are here for plausible deniability: “we pulled you aside because the machine said so, not because you’re Muslim”.
  - droithomme 7y ago
    Or the computer said he was lying about not being a terrorist, so we went to arrest him but he was not cooperative and violently resisted, which of course is what a terrorist would do, and thus we had no choice but to shoot and kill him. In self defense of course and to protect the public. This is OK because the computer determined he was a terrorist and computers don't make mistakes.
- mcherm 7y ago
  > Has this not been done? No, this has not been done. > If not, why? Because it would fail. > Or am I wrong in believing it's that simple? Nope... it's that simple. But let's be honest here: we SHOULD use this approach for ALL of these kinds of assessment, yet we don't. Even in the US, we use things like fingerprint matching, handwriting analysis, drug testing laboratories, DNA analysis, dog sniffs for drugs and so forth in legal cases yet we don't perform independent blinded tests of the accuracy of these tools.
  - sli 7y ago
    Don't forget hair analysis. And out of all of those, the only one that actually works is DNA analysis and even that fails from time to time due to how easily samples can be contaminated.
    - ergothus 7y ago
      My understanding is that DNA is basically unique, but the patterns use for conventional DNA analysis are not. While they may be statistically close enough to unique to trust over the whole population, there have been different issues when you start scoping things to different racial groups or areas with smaller gene pools (not dangerously small, just smaller). Because actually sequencing and comparing someones entire DNA would be prohibitively expensive if done for every case, they just look for a set of markers and assume that a large enough collection is close enough without accounting for distribution patterns of those markers AMONG THE SAMPLE POPULATION. (e.g. you don't have to look hard in small towns or in populations of the same heritage to notice a lot of physical characteristics that are quite common in that sub-population while being pretty distinct in the human population at large, the same is true for these markers.) . Since crimes often involve suspects from the same location and/or racial profile, a rule that is pretty reliable for the earth is not so reliable for this town/community/group of suspects. So the science is a problem even before you get to human error. The odds of a false match take hits of multiple orders of magnitude. Note: I'm not qualified to speak on the topic, but I've followed the topic with interest at a layman level for a while - be glad to hear from someone who IS qualified to speak on it to shed more light on why I'm right/wrong.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  > Has this not been done? If not, why? I'm no libertarian, but I will concede that this is a perfect example of libertarian griping about government spending: it's not getting done because no one has any incentive for it to get done. Does the manufacturer have any incentive to honestly test the machine? Hell no, then no one would buy it. Does the government have any incentive to honestly test the machine? No, because airport/customs security is security theater and their goal is convincing voters that "something is being done". (Voters might have an incentive to honestly test the machine, but it's more-or-less impossible for this preference to affect policy, unless huge numbers of people become single-issue voters about security device testing. Which isn't likely.) Do the operators have any incentive to honestly test the machine? No, because if a terrorist slips through the machine and then blows up a plane, none of the blame comes back to the individual officer who ran the test. Without any incentive for the machine to work, it's no surprise that it doesn't.
- Iv 7y ago
  Questions asked by the EU parliament: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-005624_EN.html http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-005624... Answer: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-005624-ASW_EN.html http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-005624... Apparently it has been tested, has been shown to have statistically significant result. As of November 2018 it was not used nor planned to be used on enforcing any border control, but was tested at three borders in real conditions. Even a good system would have false positives. In itself, that does not invalidate the whole system, even if I think the whole premise of this project is very shaky.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    Being statistically significant is nowhere near a high enough bar for this sort of quackery. Statistical significance is gameable, doesn't carry information about type I and II errors and frankly just means there is at least 1 common case that the machine gets right. People shouldn't be given or denied opportunity because a magic machine likes them. This machine will be like a human - it will develop a bizarre set of biases and one of them will happen to be correlated with reality. It could be producing about as much evidence as someone guessing that Arabs are Muslim - grossly stupid, statistically significant results.
    - Iv 7y ago
      Honestly at 4.5m that's a marginal project that is unlikely to be used anywhere seriously. And the EU answers makes it clear it will never take decisions alone. You know, there has been a bit weird push by brexit promoters for "frictionless" borders relying on magic tech. I suspect the funding of this could come from there. Expect it to not go anywhere once the brexit mess is over
- nyolfen 7y ago
  the point isn't detecting lies, the point is pressure to confess during interrogations. what matters is whether the person being interrogated thinks it works -- or even if they don't, to make lying more stressful.
ceejayoz 7y ago
Reminds me of this device: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 Tens of millions of dollars worth of dowsing rods.
ipsa 7y ago
The fruit machine was reincarnated for pedosexuals: a device attached to their genitals measures if they get sexual arousal from pictures of children. Those that do are not deemed ready for rehabilitation. Where most people yell scam or digital phrenology, I have a somewhat contrarian view: These systems do work. It is possible to tell, better than random guessing, if someone is gay or has a violent disposition, with just a single picture. Prisons for violent crimes see way more inmates that are bald, bearded, acned, square-jawed (signs of high testosterone). Replicated studies have shown that the profile pictures of gay men are significantly different from straight men, from subtle effects, such as more attention to grooming, to more physically noticable, like shape of the jaw being more rounded. I have no reason to disbelief that an automated system could check for tell-tale signs that someone is hiding something: needing a lot of time to answer basic questions, using their lead hand to cover their chin, looking not in the direction commonly associated with recall, but that of imagination, trembling voice, anxious eye twitches, etcetera. This is what flawed human border guards are already doing. Isreal has the most advanced airport security and trains European and American border guards to detect suspicious behavior. The TSA has over 3000 behavior detection agents. These are people with their own political and religious beliefs, prejudices, and variance -- and they can't be audited rigorously. We just never heard the accuracy, so we can't say if lie detectors can beat this (or can help as a human tool). But I bet they can. I was dissapointed that the actual video chat with the journalist and the digital border guard was not included in the investigative article. They argue that the system be interpretable, but give no full transparency themselves. I'd trust that she did not tell any lies, but I don't trust that they did not try to game/fool the system, as to have an actual article to write about. Anyway, using just one test subject is majorly flawed, and comes close to not understanding that science can't provide 100% accurate predictions, just probabilities. I feel it is a reasoning flaw to discard any automated system, by honing in on a single mistake.
- bauerd 7y ago
  Please do provide sources for all these claims
  - ipsa 7y ago
    Measuring sexual arousal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penile_plethysmograph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penile_plethysmograph & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_for_Paedophiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_for_Paedophiles Testosterone effects on face structure and violent crime: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/019188699400177T https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/019188... & https://www.healthline.com/health/low-testosterone/effects-on-body https://www.healthline.com/health/low-testosterone/effects-o... On deep nets having better gaydars than average human: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspa0000098 https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspa0000098 & https://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1036.full https://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1036.full On AVATAR (the US version of the digital border guard: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/15/lie-detectors-with-artificial-intelligence-are-future-of-border-security.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/15/lie-detectors-with-artificia... & https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563218304485?via=ihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756321... On Isreal airport security and training EU and American border agents: https://www.aerotime.aero/aerotime.team/19886-detecting-anomalies-why-israeli-airport-security-works https://www.aerotime.aero/aerotime.team/19886-detecting-anom... & https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-israeli-airport-secu_b_4978149 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-israeli-airport-secu_b_4... On 100% accuracy being impossible: https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atmospheric/scientists-predict-weather.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atm... & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem
romwell 7y ago
>Wow. What a horrorshow. You viddy, it was a very, very horrorshow machine, for it made all those vecks ittying across the border go bezoomny trying to figure out what litso to make to keep the machine like happy. It was, oh my brothers, on purpose, as to make these vecks to not want to try do that again. The bratchnies at the top must have loved it. [1] [1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:A_Clockwork_Orange https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:A_Clockwork_Orange
petre 7y ago
A waste of EU taxpayer money, that's for sure.

cgrealy 7y ago

A “lie detector”? Seriously? If you’re going to put people through this kind of system, you should have some solid science to back it up and as far as I can see, this is just some bargain basement ML agent.

s5ma6n 7y ago

It sounds like a story we have heard so many times. A sense of false security enforced by fear of terror and a system that does not work correctly. Looks like now it's the turn for European citizens to lose all their privacy and have the remaining of their data to be collected. Very unfortunate.

mc32 7y ago

At least they could use something like what has been used in India[1] (though many jurisdictions forbid its usage), at least there is some science behind it. However, because it’s science based and not just a bunch of “woo”, it has the inherent danger of being ”incontrovertible”. Kinda like DNA,but obviously flawed none the less. [1]http://theconversation.com/if-a-brain-can-be-caught-lying-should-we-admit-that-evidence-to-court-heres-what-legal-experts-think-80263 http://theconversation.com/if-a-brain-can-be-caught-lying-sh...

eth0up 7y ago
My golly - the havoc that beast would wreak if applied to all officials! It would almost be worth unleashing on the public, if perfected from the top down. Though it never seems to work that way. I'm already lucidly envisioning future politicians murmuring very nervously through federally issued mandatory truth helmets.
- cwkoss 7y ago
  I would love to see presidential debates where each candidate is hooked up to an EEG polygraph-type device. Might not work on psychopaths though.
  - eth0up 7y ago
    Realistically, I truly wonder if the consummate versions of such tech won't become the keystone of the future world's pyrrhic utopia. In some paved global labyrinth of potted plants, designer integrity and perfect safety, where lies are only fiction of the past and dissidence is a vestigial dead synapse in the collective mind.

throw9879879 7y ago

Unreliable junk like lie detectors are used on purpose. Random reinforcement simply ups the fear the peasants have of the system. Which is the intended result; who cares if a few innocent people get chopped up in the process.

switch007 7y ago

> Currently, the lie detector test is voluntary Who the hell opts in to that? > A spokesperson for iBorderCtrl declined to answer questions for this story. Oh, they don't have anything to hide, do they? Before scrolling down I knew the UK would be involved somehow. They must do anything except admit that their continous meddling (to put it mildly) in the middle east incites retaliation.

quickthrower2 7y ago
Who the hell opts in to that? I can imagine someone being manipulated into opting in. The old “if you cooperate we can quickly get you on your way” type of thing.
Accacin 7y ago
That's not entirely fair, it's in the UK it's a "EU research program has pumped some 4.5 million euros into the project, which is being managed by a consortium of 13 partners, including Greece’s Center for Security Studies, Germany’s Leibniz University Hannover, and technology and security companies like Hungary’s BioSec, Spain’s Everis, and Poland’s JAS."
- switch007 7y ago
  I didn't say the UK was exclusively involved, did I? > IBorderCtrl’s lie detection system was developed in England by researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University I.e. the system which is the subject of the article?
gowld 7y ago
Unfortunately, "voluntary" doesn't mean "opt-in", it means "Technically there are hoops you can jump through, costing time and/or money, to avoid it"

noident 7y ago

Working as designed: a smokescreen for arbitrary interrogation and denial of groups that border agents don't like. Everybody else that fails the test gets the benefit of the doubt. 75% accuracy is exactly useless, and I find it hard to believe it beats random chance anyway. More racism packed into black box quackery.

jmvoodoo 7y ago

This is begging for a deepfakes-style adversarial system.

ckemere 7y ago

One of the big challenges with software to detect lies is getting good training data. I would be suspicious of anything that wasn't trained using actual data from the particular domain that it was going to be used in. So maybe the best that can be said for this effort is that for the first few years they should ideally report scores that are actually just random (but not tell the actual border agents this, obviously) until they get enough data to train a reasonable classifier. I wouldn't be surprised if this is what is actually being done.

gherkinnn 7y ago

How is this real? > Travelers who are deemed dangerous can be denied entry, though in most cases they would never know if the avatar test had contributed to such a decision. Jesus fuck. Denied entry because the clowns who thought this face[0] is a good idea inadvertently screwed up somewhere else. Slaves to the algorithm. Disgusting. Takes diffusion of responsibility to a whole new level. > iBorderCtrl Why? Seriously. Clowns confirmed. > A study produced by the researchers in Manchester tested iBorderCtrl on 32 people [...] 75 percent accuracy [...] unbalanced in terms of ethnicity and gender. I’d bet a decent lunch that these dummies tested it on themselves. It’s like QA-ing my own stuff. That one path I implemented works fine. What do you mean there are other ways? I’ll add a dessert to said lunch if the accuracy of a representative sample is better than a dice roll. > this face [0] > An EU research program has pumped some 4.5 million euros into the project Kewl. I can think of many ways this could be spent more productively. Like setting it aflame and frying up some bacon. [0] https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2019/07/guard-photo-1000-1564076275.jpg https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2019/07/gu...

khuey 7y ago
It doesn't seem that much different than being denied entry because of the country you were born in. Borders are full of arbitrary decisions.
- campfireveteran 7y ago
  Isn't that an equivocation/conflation of differently bad things? Shouldn't border control optimize risk management based primarily on wise human intelligence on-the-ground supported by reliable or at least reliability-qualified data that doesn't hassle people any more than is absolutely necessary? For example, in the US (not the EU), the number of secret databases and watch lists that feed into current border control decision-making is absolutely frightening (per whistleblower revelations).
- dependenttypes 7y ago
  One is deterministic and you can easily avoid a 7 hour travel if you know that a country rejects people from your country while the other not so much.

rootusrootus 7y ago

Ha, for once this kind of insanity is happening in Europe instead of the US.

p0llard 7y ago

> Manchester Metropolitan University As a Brit, I can confirm that this is most certainly not a well respected institution; the UK has some of the best universities in the world, but this is not one of them.

tialaramex 7y ago
Well it depends, all the UK universities have strengths and weaknesses. In some cases there are straight up practical reasons. Years ago my university's chip fab caught fire and burned to the ground, because chip fabs do that sometimes, and obviously that significantly reduced the ability to expose students to practical skills in a clean room and so on. But most UK universities don't have a chip fab at all, which means they don't have academic staff who need one, which means undergraduates are also not getting classes with people who have that knowledge at the front. MMU has a bunch of expertise in subjects like textile making and some practical engineering disciplines, where as I wouldn't necessarily regard some of the UK's more famous universities as good on those subjects.
- p0llard 7y ago
  Soton is in an entirely different league to MMU. Textile making isn't an academic discipline, and historically would not have been taught at a university at all. If you want high quality academic research and rigour, you're far more likely to find it somewhere other than MMU. This is an unfortunate truth, but a truth nonetheless.
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    It's definitely true that "historically" textile making wouldn't have been taught at a university. Sure looks like a real academic discipline to me though, at least as much as say, law (maritime law being another of Soton's specialities) or indeed electronics. It so happens our culture prizes knowledge of electronics very highly and the development of new textiles much less so, but it could be otherwise.

neiman 7y ago

It is: - Inaccurate (surely, since real lie detectors are) - Does more harm than help - Humiliating - Will not stop any real threat - Looks like something of a dystopian film We shouldn't automate human interactions. We shouldn't automate social stuff. You automate mechanical things which are clear, not the delicate inaccurate job of a human to tell if another human is suspicious or not.

rhn_mk1 7y ago

What can EU citizens do to indicate this is unwelcome?

icebraining 7y ago
Seems some people are trying to answer that question: https://iborderctrl.no/act https://iborderctrl.no/act

raverbashing 7y ago

While this system is hard to defend, it is still in test and it's possible it will never go into production. Less BS than a polygraph maybe? > Our reporter — the first journalist to test the system before crossing the Serbian-Hungarian border earlier this year — provided honest responses to all questions but was deemed to be a liar by the machine, with four false answers out of 16 and a score of 48. He might have answered them truthfully, but if he tried (or even unintentionally acted) to influence the perception of the answers is not known.

anigbrowl 7y ago
Regardless of how good it is, do you really want to be told where you can or cannot travel by a machine? Call me an egotist but I think of myself as better than cargo.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  No, I don't. But that already happens unfortunately.

anigbrowl 7y ago

Why would anyone in their right mind contribute to or cooperate with such a project?

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

Meanwhile, we aren't far removed from the year when image recognition confused black people and gorillas. Who would ever roll this out thinking that we've made such progress since then that we can tell such nuances as lies or truth? And they still didn't balance the training set with regard to ethnicity and gender?? What a shit show. You can bet your ass that it has higher false positives for some group or other.

throwaway40000 7y ago

This is an horizon 2020 project. This is an EU program that distributes money to groups of companies + research institutions to do some research. The funding is usually a few millions over a few years. The requirements on the delivery are very lax. Basically you can get away with doing nothing useful, after all it’s research and you can’t be penalized for not finding anything, as long you show you did what you said you would try you’re ok. The commission requires the projects to have a validation part, what is described in the article is probably exactly that. Having worked in such projects the money is sometimes completely wasted. There is a whole cottage industry dedicated in bidding and executing these projects, it survives just out of the research funding and they are expert in meeting the commission requirements instead of being expert in the subject matter. Sometimes I have the feeling part of this money is a way for EU to keep some engineers busy in the poor parts of the continent, some times I feel it’s just soft corruption (reviews are often also reviewees), but for sure some project are scientifically horrible: this one looks to be one of those. That being said some projects are also nice, for instance Firefox is going to merge a web page translator which was produced by another h2020 project. The program as a whole is most probably a positive contribution to society as a whole. It’s like VC money for public research, many projects are a disaster but some are very good and make the endeavor worth.

throwaway40000 7y ago
... one of the KPIs that are used to measure success is the number of press articles about the project :)
antpls 7y ago
There never is a guarantee of result in R&D, and a few millions isnt much compared to the trillion budget of EU. However the goal of this project, with ethical concerns, is worrying

aiyodev 7y ago

The lied detector was invented by the creator of the Wonder Woman comic after he noticed his wife's blood pressure rose when she was angry. It gained widespread adoption after he made commercials for Gillette to "prove" that their razors were superior to the competition. It's wacky comic book technology that doesn't work. It only appears to work because it tricks people into confessing to crimes. Why stop at the lie detector? Why not have a block of kryptonite at every airport to protect them from attacks by Zod? Why not give every cop a batarang? It's insane that we still allow our governments to spend our tax dollars on this.

outworlder 7y ago

gowld 7y ago

> Ray Bull [...] told The Intercept that the iBorderCtrl project was “not credible” What an aptonym!

Krasnol 7y ago

Describe in single words, only the good things that come in to your mind about... your mother.

z-10 7y ago

Glory to Arstotzka

zizee 7y ago

Ignoring the fact that this doesn't work, can you imagine if you could accurately detect someone is lying with devices that everyone carries with them? Just imagine the power that such a technology a totalitarian government could wield using this. Jethro's phone beeped incessantly to remind him that he had not completed his patriot assessment in the last 24 hours. He groaned internally, and even though he was running late for work he decided that he had better take the 5 minutes to complete the test. He couldn't afford to lose any more social credit points this month. Opening the app, he could see his face in the top corner of the screen to help him know the camera was centered on his face, not that he really needed this after doing the assessment almost daily since his 10th birthday. The first question flashed onto the screen, "Have you committed any crimes in the last 24 hours"

reaperducer 7y ago
Just imagine the power that such a technology a totalitarian government could wield using this. Just imagine the power of the people in a crowd pointing them at a politician making a speech.
- zizee 7y ago
  I imagine there has been many a time with someone making a hateful speech where they believe every word that they are saying (regardless of whether are right or not). Politicians are also masters of speech where they are technically correct, they sound like they are saying one thing, but remain evasive/non-committal.
- catalogia 7y ago
  Such a crowd would select skilled liars and sociopaths to lead them. Wait..
campfireveteran 7y ago
A manager in the border security apparatus with no real-world experience sold their managers on technology solutions to human intelligence problems, and the higher-ups drooled at all the salary and hourly employee money they could divert to their pet projects and pyramidal fiefdoms.

I_am_tiberius 7y ago

Sounds dystopian. Somehow we seem to have moved to a parallel universe. I thought Europe is the last safe place on earth.

jupp0r 7y ago

Even if this worked with high accuracy, it’s pure base rate fallacy [1] to assume it would have any practical usefulness beyond security theater. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

dabbledash 7y ago

Good. A version of this that actually worked would be a lot more horrifying. After all, the problem with oppressive governments isn’t usually “accuracy.”

campfireveteran 7y ago

Does it come with a coupon for the Kafkaesque social credit system patterned on China that isn't far behind it?

chiph 7y ago

There's no way I'm installing software like this on my computer. They already snoop through your phone when you pass through border control, I'm not assisting them in their data collection efforts by granting them access via an install.

anonymouswacker 7y ago

Regardless of how stupid, wrong, and dangerous this is, it or something just as useless will crop up because government can easily justify wasting money when "your safety" is at stake.

monksy 7y ago

They expect people to take that fake "official" seriously? If I go up to it.. what's stopping me from having it take a picture of my junk or telling that it can sod off?

antpls 7y ago

> IBorderCtrl’s lie detection system was developed in England by researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University, who say that the technology can pick up on “micro gestures” a person makes while answering questions on their computer, analyzing their facial expressions, gaze, and posture. As an European, I don't even know how that project obtained funds from EU. Even if it "worked", it's the opposite of the future I would like to build. I suspect this project will never be implemented full-scale, and is only for research on human emotions understanding. This project should be reviewd by more journalists, because very few Europeans know their taxes are used for that kind of anti-humanitarian projects and they should be informed about it

sammorrowdrums 7y ago

Released a paper that suggested "75% accuracy on 35 people" with admission of bias in the test set participant make-up. Sounds like the confidence interval would be very poor. This is exactly like all those other studies that found an effect in a small sample but didn't use basic statistics to realise what kind of sample size they would need to actually prove an effect. Nor (if I can tell) was there any acknowledgement about the fact that asking normal people to lie and trying to observe a hardened criminal / fundamentalist is not the same. I worked on something with an ex-chief of the flying squad who said that there is a huge difference.