7 ms·

Homeland Security moves forward with 'pre-crime' detection

65 points by Suraj-Sun 15y ago

plasticky 15y ago
Wonder how many false positives this would generate at the metal detectors in a Wal Mart.
DanI-S 15y ago
It's nice to see America's proud tradition of racial profiling being brought forward into the 21st Century. Go, science. The deployment of this technology should not be acceptable to anybody who believes in our right to live in a free society of equals.
- dkokelley 15y ago
  How is this racial profiling? I accept that it is profiling. But where and how does race come in to play?
  - DanI-S 15y ago
    Direct quote from the article: But where "Minority Report" author Philip K. Dick enlisted psychics to predict crimes, DHS is betting on algorithms: it's building a "prototype screening facility" that it hopes will use factors such as ethnicity, gender, breathing, and heart rate to "detect cues indicative of mal-intent."
    - dkokelley 15y ago
      I missed that part on my first read. Rereading it makes me think that ethnicity would be used along with age, gender, height, and weight to find a baseline for the 'indicative' factors like heart rate. I agree that once any genetic factors are used as indicative factors we have crossed a dangerous line. I sincerely hope that this phrase in the article was simply worded poorly.
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      - StavrosK 15y ago
        It's much more likely that these inputs will be used as features to train some ML algorithm, rather than that they will actually be used to say "if black then detain".
        pavel_lishin 15y ago
        Yeah, why bother training the computer to do it when TSA employees can cover that angle.
        JoshTriplett 15y ago
        The limitations of machine learning aside, this could actually work quite well if trained properly, because it wouldn't raise the questions that human choices do about bias. Given sufficient information, a machine-learning algorithm can make decisions based on factors that humans would refuse to consider or would intentionally err on the side of not considering.
        StavrosK 15y ago
        Yes, of course. It could also disregard features completely if it has found that they make no statistical difference.
        JoshTriplett 15y ago
        Exactly. Most importantly, it can focus exclusively on statistics, rather than guesses.
        woodson 15y ago
        One problem I see with this is that these statistics involve a lot of human bias. If you train your classifier on crime statistics, it's not based on a 'ground truth' (which is never attainable in a criminal case), but an expert's, i.e. judge's/jury's, decision.
    - gjm11 15y ago
      Yes, but the article appears to be making this claim without any actual evidence. (See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3084699 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3084699 for slightly more details.)
      - VladRussian 15y ago
        you don't need any evidence as it is obvious that ethnicity is part of the feature vector being fed into the system. Even if we imagine unimaginable - that it (together with other highly correlating data like place of birth) is not fed into the system from the start, the face recognition and other input feature vectors generating modules would produce the configuration in the parameter space where basic generic clustering at the pre-processing stage would also naturally cluster along ethnicity lines thus still making ethnicity an input for higher levels of the system. How this input will play inside that giant neural/statistical net wouldn't be possible to say as debugging such nets is an endeavor in itself. Previous implementations of such a pre-crime detection neural nets - using homo sapiens brain as hardware - produced "being black is a probable cause", and nobody was able to debug it in sufficient detail. Would we be able to produce better results using silicon based hardware?
  - bilbo0s 15y ago
    Wow dkokelley, did you read the article? In it, the statement is made that the technology will use factors such as ethnicity and gender to determine who was thinking about committing a crime. I wonder if tech like this will encourage more self-segregation? People, particularly blacks, will discover over time that they will encounter less legal trouble if they behave in a certain fashion. That includes staying away from places where 'people like you' would not be expected. EDIT: OK ... I see your comment below now dkokelley.
bediger 15y ago
The only thing DHS could do to make their image worse is to buy uniforms with shiny boots and brown shirts for all their employees.
- sneak 15y ago
  Consider for a moment that even if they did this tomorrow and announced it on the front page of the Times, people would continue to live in America, pay taxes, and take commercial flights. The time to leave was some time ago. The first, second, fourth, and fifth amendments are all gone, now.
  - forensic 15y ago
    People actually look-forward to dystopian big brother futures like Minority Report now. If you tell someone, "The world is looking like Minority Report" they go "Cool!"
    - anamax 15y ago
      Of course they do. MR-world has cool cars, is clean, the govt seems to have only one flaw, and Tom Cruise will wander by and save the day.
pavel_lishin 15y ago
So this system is identify people who are nervous about being misidentified by this system? Brilliant!
dkokelley 15y ago
I'm a little disappointed with the response here. This isn't "racial profiling". FAST is designed to track and monitor, among other inputs, body movements, voice pitch changes, prosody changes (alterations in the rhythm and intonation of speech), eye movements, body heat changes, and breathing patterns. Occupation and age are also considered. A government source told CNET that blink rate and pupil variation are measured too. This technology should only be used to say "look here" to assist the people behind the technology. Ideally, this will help a few screeners identify people in a crowd who are behaving abnormally. This 'tech' has been used in security for ages. Only earlier we called it "I have a funny feeling about that guy" and now we can say "this man is suspiciously nervous, and here's the science to show it". I don't want to get political, but the politically correct method of pure random screening in airports is horribly ineffective. Security professionals in unstable regions know this, which is why they are trained to look for the exact things this device is looking for. The danger of this technology isn't that it will start issuing arrest warrants based on probable intent. The danger is that the people behind the technology will get it wrong. History shows that we don't need technology to help get it wrong. Please don't confuse this technology with political positions. Has the TSA gotten out of hand? Sure. Are our rights being violated? Probably in many cases. Does this technology have anything to do with that? That only depends on how it's used.
- jarrett 15y ago
  We can't unequivocally say it's not racial profiling. All we know from the article is that ethnicity is being used as a factor. If a person's race/ethnicity can in any way make it more likely for the system to flag that person, then racial profiling is arguably happening. So the question is: Under this system, can a person's race increase the likelihood of a positive result? It seems the answer is yes. If race is a factor, that means it's somehow being used as in input into the algorithm that determines a person's suspicion score. Maybe it's not something as heavy handed as "boost the suspicion score if the person is of race X." Suppose it's "weigh eye movement more heavily than breathing if the person is of race X." Even then, the effect is to increase the likelihood of a positive result _for some people_ based on their race.
  - 15y ago
softwaregravy 15y ago
Least likely organization to pull this off in the world -- other than my grandmothers knitting group, but they have enough sense not to try doing things they will surely fail at.
alexsb92 15y ago
What would happen to something like this, if it starts getting a lot of false positives. Considering it's breathing and heart rate, could we not easily make it give out false positives? I mean it would probably inconvenience us, as an individual, but after a few months of tons of false positives, would they not abort it?
- forensic 15y ago
  It's more important that people believe it works than for it to actually work. Security theatre works because people believe it works.
Batsu 15y ago
Hate to play devil's advocate, but it sounds somewhat similar to what Israel does with their airports, but leveraging technology to identify all details (and more than a human could reasonably do), rather than training individuals to do the same. Methods, deployment (in terms of location) and data retention are obviously the distinguishing factors here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024850 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024850 for an article on it, from around two years ago.
- VladRussian 15y ago
  >Hate to play devil's advocate, but it sounds somewhat similar to what Israel does who said that Israel is human rights, non-racial/ethnical-discrimination, etc... champion? Don't get me wrong - i'm not anti-Israel, i completely understand the necessity of the war they fighting for their survival. It is just that when you fight a war for your survival you don't have the luxury of championing human rights. Israel situation isn't an example to follow, it is a problem to be fixed when the war is over.
rshm 15y ago
1984 will be a reality in 2084.
- maratd 15y ago
  Oh please. I just got a ticket in the mail because an automated camera decided I did something wrong. It's here now.
dataminer 15y ago
These "precautionary" measures and profiling databases are being developed in most parts of the world. Governments are becoming more and more intrusive in personal lives in the name of security. I really wish someone would buy some land or islands and create a modern country based on libertarian principles, it will be an interesting experiment/startup, although I am not sure if you can start a country just by buying land.
- VladRussian 15y ago
  Governments consist of the same people like you and me. Your imaginary "modern country based on libertarian principles" would consist of the same people and it will look the same (if not worst) after short time. Problem isn't government. Problem is "we, the people". (my old country was the leader in implementing "modern country based on best principles known to the humanity at the time". The main mistake people do when look back is blaming the principles, saying that these principles were bad and these are different and better. Nope. After all, the best principles of yesterday - communism and fascism - looked very different (with each claiming to be the best), yet both produced the same result, and today we do understand how much they were the same. The best principles of today (libertarianism according to you, Sharia Islam according to several hundred millions of some other people, ...) will be superseded by the best principles of tomorrow. It isn't the principles that kill millions of other peoples and make lives of other people nightmare. It is other people who do it. It isn't modern country that we need, it is the modern people. For example, people who just wouldn't compile the big database, wouldn't run the analysis and wouldn't issue the order to act upon the result of analysis. It is just that simple and just that hard. )
- colanderman 15y ago
  I am not sure if you can start a country just by buying land. The Palestinians tried this recently. Heck, they didn't even need to buy the land; they already owned it. Hasn't gone too well for them yet.

65 points by Suraj-Sun 15y ago

Wonder how many false positives this would generate at the metal detectors in a Wal Mart.

It's nice to see America's proud tradition of racial profiling being brought forward into the 21st Century. Go, science. The deployment of this technology should not be acceptable to anybody who believes in our right to live in a free society of equals.

dkokelley 15y ago
How is this racial profiling? I accept that it is profiling. But where and how does race come in to play?
- DanI-S 15y ago
  Direct quote from the article: But where "Minority Report" author Philip K. Dick enlisted psychics to predict crimes, DHS is betting on algorithms: it's building a "prototype screening facility" that it hopes will use factors such as ethnicity, gender, breathing, and heart rate to "detect cues indicative of mal-intent."
  - dkokelley 15y ago
    I missed that part on my first read. Rereading it makes me think that ethnicity would be used along with age, gender, height, and weight to find a baseline for the 'indicative' factors like heart rate. I agree that once any genetic factors are used as indicative factors we have crossed a dangerous line. I sincerely hope that this phrase in the article was simply worded poorly.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - StavrosK 15y ago
      It's much more likely that these inputs will be used as features to train some ML algorithm, rather than that they will actually be used to say "if black then detain".
      - pavel_lishin 15y ago
        Yeah, why bother training the computer to do it when TSA employees can cover that angle.
      - JoshTriplett 15y ago
        The limitations of machine learning aside, this could actually work quite well if trained properly, because it wouldn't raise the questions that human choices do about bias. Given sufficient information, a machine-learning algorithm can make decisions based on factors that humans would refuse to consider or would intentionally err on the side of not considering.
        StavrosK 15y ago
        Yes, of course. It could also disregard features completely if it has found that they make no statistical difference.
        JoshTriplett 15y ago
        Exactly. Most importantly, it can focus exclusively on statistics, rather than guesses.
        woodson 15y ago
        One problem I see with this is that these statistics involve a lot of human bias. If you train your classifier on crime statistics, it's not based on a 'ground truth' (which is never attainable in a criminal case), but an expert's, i.e. judge's/jury's, decision.
  - gjm11 15y ago
    Yes, but the article appears to be making this claim without any actual evidence. (See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3084699 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3084699 for slightly more details.)
    - VladRussian 15y ago
      you don't need any evidence as it is obvious that ethnicity is part of the feature vector being fed into the system. Even if we imagine unimaginable - that it (together with other highly correlating data like place of birth) is not fed into the system from the start, the face recognition and other input feature vectors generating modules would produce the configuration in the parameter space where basic generic clustering at the pre-processing stage would also naturally cluster along ethnicity lines thus still making ethnicity an input for higher levels of the system. How this input will play inside that giant neural/statistical net wouldn't be possible to say as debugging such nets is an endeavor in itself. Previous implementations of such a pre-crime detection neural nets - using homo sapiens brain as hardware - produced "being black is a probable cause", and nobody was able to debug it in sufficient detail. Would we be able to produce better results using silicon based hardware?
- bilbo0s 15y ago
  Wow dkokelley, did you read the article? In it, the statement is made that the technology will use factors such as ethnicity and gender to determine who was thinking about committing a crime. I wonder if tech like this will encourage more self-segregation? People, particularly blacks, will discover over time that they will encounter less legal trouble if they behave in a certain fashion. That includes staying away from places where 'people like you' would not be expected. EDIT: OK ... I see your comment below now dkokelley.

bediger 15y ago

The only thing DHS could do to make their image worse is to buy uniforms with shiny boots and brown shirts for all their employees.

sneak 15y ago
Consider for a moment that even if they did this tomorrow and announced it on the front page of the Times, people would continue to live in America, pay taxes, and take commercial flights. The time to leave was some time ago. The first, second, fourth, and fifth amendments are all gone, now.
- forensic 15y ago
  People actually look-forward to dystopian big brother futures like Minority Report now. If you tell someone, "The world is looking like Minority Report" they go "Cool!"
  - anamax 15y ago
    Of course they do. MR-world has cool cars, is clean, the govt seems to have only one flaw, and Tom Cruise will wander by and save the day.

pavel_lishin 15y ago

So this system is identify people who are nervous about being misidentified by this system? Brilliant!

dkokelley 15y ago

I'm a little disappointed with the response here. This isn't "racial profiling". FAST is designed to track and monitor, among other inputs, body movements, voice pitch changes, prosody changes (alterations in the rhythm and intonation of speech), eye movements, body heat changes, and breathing patterns. Occupation and age are also considered. A government source told CNET that blink rate and pupil variation are measured too. This technology should only be used to say "look here" to assist the people behind the technology. Ideally, this will help a few screeners identify people in a crowd who are behaving abnormally. This 'tech' has been used in security for ages. Only earlier we called it "I have a funny feeling about that guy" and now we can say "this man is suspiciously nervous, and here's the science to show it". I don't want to get political, but the politically correct method of pure random screening in airports is horribly ineffective. Security professionals in unstable regions know this, which is why they are trained to look for the exact things this device is looking for. The danger of this technology isn't that it will start issuing arrest warrants based on probable intent. The danger is that the people behind the technology will get it wrong. History shows that we don't need technology to help get it wrong. Please don't confuse this technology with political positions. Has the TSA gotten out of hand? Sure. Are our rights being violated? Probably in many cases. Does this technology have anything to do with that? That only depends on how it's used.

jarrett 15y ago
We can't unequivocally say it's not racial profiling. All we know from the article is that ethnicity is being used as a factor. If a person's race/ethnicity can in any way make it more likely for the system to flag that person, then racial profiling is arguably happening. So the question is: Under this system, can a person's race increase the likelihood of a positive result? It seems the answer is yes. If race is a factor, that means it's somehow being used as in input into the algorithm that determines a person's suspicion score. Maybe it's not something as heavy handed as "boost the suspicion score if the person is of race X." Suppose it's "weigh eye movement more heavily than breathing if the person is of race X." Even then, the effect is to increase the likelihood of a positive result _for some people_ based on their race.
- 15y ago

softwaregravy 15y ago

Least likely organization to pull this off in the world -- other than my grandmothers knitting group, but they have enough sense not to try doing things they will surely fail at.

alexsb92 15y ago

What would happen to something like this, if it starts getting a lot of false positives. Considering it's breathing and heart rate, could we not easily make it give out false positives? I mean it would probably inconvenience us, as an individual, but after a few months of tons of false positives, would they not abort it?

forensic 15y ago
It's more important that people believe it works than for it to actually work. Security theatre works because people believe it works.

Batsu 15y ago

Hate to play devil's advocate, but it sounds somewhat similar to what Israel does with their airports, but leveraging technology to identify all details (and more than a human could reasonably do), rather than training individuals to do the same. Methods, deployment (in terms of location) and data retention are obviously the distinguishing factors here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024850 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024850 for an article on it, from around two years ago.

VladRussian 15y ago
>Hate to play devil's advocate, but it sounds somewhat similar to what Israel does who said that Israel is human rights, non-racial/ethnical-discrimination, etc... champion? Don't get me wrong - i'm not anti-Israel, i completely understand the necessity of the war they fighting for their survival. It is just that when you fight a war for your survival you don't have the luxury of championing human rights. Israel situation isn't an example to follow, it is a problem to be fixed when the war is over.

rshm 15y ago

1984 will be a reality in 2084.

maratd 15y ago
Oh please. I just got a ticket in the mail because an automated camera decided I did something wrong. It's here now.

dataminer 15y ago

These "precautionary" measures and profiling databases are being developed in most parts of the world. Governments are becoming more and more intrusive in personal lives in the name of security. I really wish someone would buy some land or islands and create a modern country based on libertarian principles, it will be an interesting experiment/startup, although I am not sure if you can start a country just by buying land.

VladRussian 15y ago
Governments consist of the same people like you and me. Your imaginary "modern country based on libertarian principles" would consist of the same people and it will look the same (if not worst) after short time. Problem isn't government. Problem is "we, the people". (my old country was the leader in implementing "modern country based on best principles known to the humanity at the time". The main mistake people do when look back is blaming the principles, saying that these principles were bad and these are different and better. Nope. After all, the best principles of yesterday - communism and fascism - looked very different (with each claiming to be the best), yet both produced the same result, and today we do understand how much they were the same. The best principles of today (libertarianism according to you, Sharia Islam according to several hundred millions of some other people, ...) will be superseded by the best principles of tomorrow. It isn't the principles that kill millions of other peoples and make lives of other people nightmare. It is other people who do it. It isn't modern country that we need, it is the modern people. For example, people who just wouldn't compile the big database, wouldn't run the analysis and wouldn't issue the order to act upon the result of analysis. It is just that simple and just that hard. )
colanderman 15y ago
I am not sure if you can start a country just by buying land. The Palestinians tried this recently. Heck, they didn't even need to buy the land; they already owned it. Hasn't gone too well for them yet.