Via Oscar Wildebeest, this little gem. A lie detector for airport security in Russia.
The technology, to be introduced at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport as early as July, is intended to identify terrorists and drug smugglers. If successful, it could revolutionise check-ins.
You don’t say? The wording used is wonderfully ironic, in a strange, creepy kind of way. If you have a dark enough sense of humour, you’d even find is amusing. Terrorists and drug smugglers are so easy to identify, a machine could do it. I guess I qualify for dark humour after all.
Passengers will pick up the handset of a “truth verifier” machine while they are asked questions. Apparently the machine, developed by an Israeli company, can even establish whether answers come from the memory or the imagination.
And if you give the “wrong” answer?
“If a person fails, he is accompanied by a guard to a cubicle where he is asked questions in a more intense atmosphere,” Mr Kornilov said.
Well, that’s comforting. It all sounds a bit Smiley’s People, though. A quick trip to the head of Moscow Station perhaps. Then the gulag? The Russians do, however, recognise that not everyone will be elated by this news:
“We know that this could be uncomfortable for some passengers but it is a necessary step,” said Vladimir Kornilov, the IT director for East Line, which operates the airport.
With, I might add, a touch of devastating understatement. And it’s a “necessary step”. Oh, well, that’s okay then, so long as it is “necessary”, we can rest easy in the knowledge that the authorities will be doing the right thing, can’t we?
This has the potential for “computer says no” writ large in big friendly letters. As Oscar points out, how long before El-Tone and the Rancorous thug decide to check out one for installation at Heathrow and Gatwick? All for our own good of course. If it’s “necessary” in Russia, you can be sure that it is even more “necessary” here, what with the streets being overrun with “terrorists” in these “dangerous” times. Well, so they tell us, and they must know what they are talking about, we elected them after all. Didn’t we? Oh, wait, most of us didn’t.
I wonder how the technology responds to answers such as “mind your own business”, “piss off”, or “I choose not to answer that”? Belmarsh, I suppose… :dry:
Now playing: Billy Joel – You May Be Right
Smashing, LR, and spot on. No doubt the machine is pre-set to recognise the “right” answers, of which “piss off” is not one.
Mind you, if your heart rate doesn’t go up when you say it, you might get away with it…
Maybe I should get fitted with a pacemaker. :whistle:
I thought lie detectors had been almost completely discredited by now.
http://www.aztriad.com/aacarton/lie1.html
And even if they worked all the evil terrorist have to do is slip their bomb into the bag of someone who doesn’t know they’re carrying it.
Another winner in the war against abstract concepts I supppose.
Lie detectors don’t detect lies they detect stress, the inventor actually initially marketed the polygraph not as a lie detector but as a love detector. For some reason application didn’t take off.
Airports are stressful enough experiences, which would be made more so by having to wait in the queue up for this pointless machine while the time that you have got before boarding ticks down. False positives will be very very common, so common that should anyone actually be exhibiting stress because they are about to hijack an areoplane it will get completely lost in noise of everybody else stressed about missing their areoplane.