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There's a difference in reaction between someone nervous of cops vs. someone about to die in the willful act of mass murder.

serf 13y ago
> There's a difference in reaction between someone nervous of cops vs. someone about to die in the willful act of mass murder. That's a pretty nuanced decision for the inspector to make. Polygraph machines and their operators routinely mess that one up. I doubt that they themselves claim they can make that differentiation, and if they do so make that claim, I'd bet cash on it that it has been untested as far as accuracy regarding false positives. Generally speaking, teaching 'technique' to a layman and expecting them to all be of equal caliber is just simply wrong.
- ufmace 13y ago
  True, but that's why they reportedly pay lots more than minimum wage, recruit carefully, and train heavily. And also profile the hell out of people. The real difference is that it's only one airport. It would be very expensive and time-consuming to scale that up to secure every airport in the US. Not much news about false positives for them makes it out, at least not in English-language media, but the worst I've heard of them doing is grilling suspicious people for a few hours.
icambron 13y ago
Huh. I wonder how they train the inspectors?
biot 13y ago
Saying that there's a difference is a tautology. Of course there's a difference. There's also a difference between someone trying to decide between getting an apple or a blueberry danish. The important bits are whether the difference is detectable in a manner that is convenient (putting each passenger through an MRI machine is out of the question), reliable (minimize false positives and false negatives), and so on. Just saying "there's a difference" adds no new information to the conversation unless you're able to expand on the quantifiable aspects of those differences.

serf 13y ago

> There's a difference in reaction between someone nervous of cops vs. someone about to die in the willful act of mass murder. That's a pretty nuanced decision for the inspector to make. Polygraph machines and their operators routinely mess that one up. I doubt that they themselves claim they can make that differentiation, and if they do so make that claim, I'd bet cash on it that it has been untested as far as accuracy regarding false positives. Generally speaking, teaching 'technique' to a layman and expecting them to all be of equal caliber is just simply wrong.

ufmace 13y ago
True, but that's why they reportedly pay lots more than minimum wage, recruit carefully, and train heavily. And also profile the hell out of people. The real difference is that it's only one airport. It would be very expensive and time-consuming to scale that up to secure every airport in the US. Not much news about false positives for them makes it out, at least not in English-language media, but the worst I've heard of them doing is grilling suspicious people for a few hours.

icambron 13y ago

Huh. I wonder how they train the inspectors?

biot 13y ago

Saying that there's a difference is a tautology. Of course there's a difference. There's also a difference between someone trying to decide between getting an apple or a blueberry danish. The important bits are whether the difference is detectable in a manner that is convenient (putting each passenger through an MRI machine is out of the question), reliable (minimize false positives and false negatives), and so on. Just saying "there's a difference" adds no new information to the conversation unless you're able to expand on the quantifiable aspects of those differences.