If researchers get their way, you may, one day, be able to walk through the airport as freely as you did before 9/11. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, it means that every single movement you make will be scrutinized, creating an even more disturbing airport experience than already exists.
The Homeland Security-funded project is Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST. Instead of focusing on whether you have hidden explosives or whether you’re carrying a weapon, sensors and cameras located at security checkpoints would measure the natural signals coming from your body — your heart rate, breathing, eye movement, body temperature and fidgeting.
Those physiological signs, measured together, will indicate whether you might have the desire or intent to do harm, project manager Robert Burns said.
Or, it could be something else. You’re in an airport. You’re afraid of flying. You’re already freaking out. Now, you freak out more about accidentally tripping the sensors, except you freaked out too much and did, indeed trip the sensors.
You could also be drunk, high, or smoking a cigarette. These all alter your heart rate.
FAST could be used wherever there are special security concerns, including stadiums, convention centers, federal buildings, mass transit centers and airports.
Civil liberties groups maintain this screening technology is an invasion of privacy.
“Nobody has the right to look at my intimate bodily functions, my breathing, my perspiration rate, my heart rate, from afar,” said Joe Stanley of the ACLU.
While this is an invasion of privacy, it’s even more so when added to the fact that the airlines already keep a record of your race, sex, destination, length of vacation, what credit cards you use, and what’s in your luggage. Now, you must ensure that you have the right emotions as you saunter through the airport.
Making people FEEL safe is not a good idea. It’s security theater. Invading people’s privacy only serves to piss them off. We are guaranteed the right to be secure in our persons. Using technology that may or may not detect perceived behavior is never a good idea. Thinking something is not doing something. If it were, I’d have murdered about 527 people by now. I hate waiting on lines. If I’m in line for more than five minutes. The longer I wait, the angrier I get. Every time I fly, I have about 15 people that I’d like to kill so I can get through the line quicker.
This program will, in the end, be used to profile “certain” individuals instead of being used for its intended purpose. It’s just a way of hiding that fact. A few drug traffickers are likely to be caught with this system and it will be hailed as a great device that everyone needs. In the end, we’ll lose a little bit more of our privacy, having been subjected to naked xray body scans and behavioral scanning, but we’ll still believe we’re safe because nothing has blown up. Using general measures to detect specific actions is flawed from the start and is why we should cut our losses while we can, lest we not learn from failed systems we’ve already spent millions on.
