Seucring airports by reading people's minds (or bodies)

DHS has developed a system to recognize, define, and measure seven primary emotions and emotional cues that are reflected in contractions of facial muscles. MALINTENT identifies these emotions and relays the information back to a security screener almost in real-time.

This whole security array — the scanners and screeners who make up the mobile lab — is called “Future Attribute Screening Technology,” or FAST, because it is designed to get passengers through security in two to four minutes, and often faster. Now, if one is rushed or stressed, one may send out signals of anxiety, but FAST is not confused. It is already good enough to tell the difference between a harried traveler and a terrorist. Even if one sweats heavily by nature, FAST will not mistake you for a baddie. “If you focus on looking at the person, you don’t have to worry about detecting the device itself,” said Bob Burns, MALINTENT’s project leader. While there are devices out there that look at individual cues, a comprehensive screening device like this has never before been put together. FAST’s success rate is classified, Undersecretary for Science and Technology Adm. Jay Cohen declared the experiment a “home run.”

As cold and inhuman as the electric eye may be, DHS says scanners are unbiased and nonjudgmental. “It does not predict who you are and make a judgment, it only provides an assessment in situations,” said Burns. “It analyzes you against baseline stats when you walk in the door, it measures reactions and variations when you approach and go through the portal.”

The testing, though, and the device itself, are not without their problems. The invasive scanner catalogues one’s vital signs for non-medical reasons, and some may regard it as an uninvited doctor’s exam and raises many privacy issues. DHS says this is not Big Brother. Once one is through the FAST portal, one’s scrutiny is over and records are not kept. “Your data is dumped,” said Burns. “The information is not maintained — it doesn’t track who you are.”

DHS is now planning an even wider array of screening technology, including an eye scanner next year and pheromone-reading technology by 2010. The team will also be adding equipment which reads body movements, or what the developers call “illustrative and emblem Cues.” According to Burns, this is achievable because people “move in reaction to what they are thinking, more or less based on the context of the situation.”

Note that FAST may also incorporate biological, radiological, and explosive detection, but for now the primary focus is on identifying and isolating potential human threats. Because FAST is a mobile screening laboratory, it could be set up at entrances to stadiums, malls, and in airports, making it ever more difficult for terrorists to live and work among us.

Burns noted his team’s goal is to “restore a sense of freedom.” Barrie writes that once MALINTENT is rolled out in airports, “it could give us a future where we can once again wander onto planes with super-sized cosmetics and all the bottles of water we can carry — and most importantly without that sense of foreboding that has haunted Americans since Sept. 11.”