> How do you know they don't have a button to push to make it give a false positive so they can hold people?
That exact thought crossed my mind afterwards.
In the end, they never showed me any evidence that the machine had actually detected any explosive. Nor did they figure out what could have caused the "false positive".
Maybe they did detect something, but then what's equally surprising is the thought that they would then just let someone go after they have walked into JFK with explosives on their body.
The dogs aren't purposefully trained to give false positives, that's just a side effect of how social dogs are. They want to please their handler and the handler gives them rewards.
It could be the dog trying to naturally please the cop, or the cop could have inadvertently trained the behavior (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans), or the training may very well have been deliberate.
It would be damn hard to prove the last, but what is relatively easy to demonstrate is that dogs do give false signals that correspond to certain biases of the owners. Regardless of whether the last is true or not, the way we view detector dogs needs to be revisited in light of these clear biases. As it is, detector dogs seem to be barely better than dosing rods.
There is no button labeled "Fuck the 4th Amendment" but a clever technician might know how to manipulate the results, if needed. But why would they need to? They could just lie.
No, because sometimes they need a plausible excuse to act on other suspicions.
When working security, agents can sense something is wrong but not have it articulable enough in legal terms to act on. When the suspect says "why are you searching me?" it's a lot easier on everyone to say "the detector beeped, you heard it" than "I've got an uneasy feeling about you". (Not legal, not warranted, just easier.)
I'm pretty sure they don't need any excuse at all. They can just do a "random" screening - which is designed exactly for that.
The only reason to keep screening him over and over is if the detector really did find something, otherwise they are just wasting their own time because of a nebulous feeling.
Uh... The person has already exhibited enough suspicious behavior and circumstantial evidence to get frisked & questioned in a back room and their ticket cancelled. Indications are this is the kind of person being looked for, and if is, at this point is trying very hard to not reveal any further evidence of ill intent. Time to crack the egg and see if it's rotten.
> How do you know they don't have a button to push to make it give a false positive so they can hold people?
I've never been in the US, but when I travel (Europe, MENA), I am always chosen by airport security, even in my own country when leaving, for an additional search (less annoying than a TSA patdown I read of, but still), and when I asked recently why is it always me, a guy answered I was randomly selected by the gate. Got to start buying lottery tickets.
There are many people who enjoy controlling or even abusing others and positions that give people power over others obviously attract those people - psychopathy prevalence in those groups is statistically higher than in general population. This is not as rare as you might think - if you work in a home for elderly with Alzheimer's disease (who are especially defenseless) I can almost guarantee that apart from caring hard-working employees you also encounter a psychopath (although nowadays this problem is relatively well known and the screening of potential employees is much better than it used to be).
Also I can imagine a number of rationalizations and psychological mechanisms that can explain how working for this kind of organization affects people - the Stanford Prison Experiment etc.
>Also I can imagine a number of rationalizations and psychological mechanisms that can explain how working for this kind of organization affects people - the Stanford Prison Experiment etc.
I up-voted your comment, that comic strip is spot on, but I was trying to express my feelings more than stating some general statement about human nature.
I remember that when I was reading Zimbardo's book I was most touched when he was describing how he himself was under the influence of the experiment and his empathy to "subjects" deteriorated. Only after his girlfriend expressed her concerns he realized that something went horribly wrong. We are influenced by the context, behaviour of others, interpretation of the situation etc. way more than we would like to believe and I can easily imagine that if I were one of those TSA agents I could behave in a way that I now find despicable. That's why I think we really need to be aware of those things despite the fact that they might not be conclusively proven as a 'part of human nature'.
EDIT: also let me mention another IMO super-interesting book about this subject: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm. One of the best books I've ever red.
They appear more vigilant to their managers and overseers, for one. If every single traveler is simply ushered through, it could look like they're being lazy (not necessarily efficient). And there is a clear bureaucratic incentive to meeting a quota of passengers who will get extra scrutiny. Without marking at least some minimal number of passengers for increased scrutiny, the TSA interrogators, FBI stand-by, etc would have nothing to do and no opportunity to gain real-world "practice" applying their job training and skills.
Sure it's plausible. It's just incredibly unlikely (not least because this notion that the TSA is some white power apparatus seems to be at odds with the reality that the TSA is a very diverse workforce. Add that the passenger list in most urban centers is incredibly diverse, and this idea that it's just xenophobia seems quite nonsensical. Another post talks about how this demonstrates how the US views "foreigners" -- have these people never been to New York City, where this happened? It is about the most inclusive, vibrant, multicultural place on the planet).
Indeed, the narrative of this very story seemed to be overwhelmingly focused on figuring out why he was setting off the explosives detectors. They repeatedly went through his belongings and tried to figure out if he was indeed in the business of making explosions. They almost certainly used a secret warrant to go into his apartment to, again, see if there was an explosives lab there. They really thought they had something when the explosives detector found something it didn't like, and there is no rational reason they would do this just because someone was Muslim (again, Muslims make hundreds of millions of flights in the US -- do people seriously think this is what they go through?)
Also, if you have a "secret button" used by hundrets of TSA officials, with at least some borderline irresponsible, how long do you think it takes for those news to leak out? Two weeks?
The only way to keep a secret for long periods is that few know about it.
Well, we had thousands of people violating the 4th Amendment willy-nilly looking at our email and phone data and it's taken years for that to credibly leak out. Bucking authority like that is not only unusual, it's downright rare. Don't count on it.
However, keep in mind that the NSA doesn't employ that many people. Furthermore, these people mostly work in the same area, have been vetted repeatedly, and are watched. The TSA, on the other hand, works everywhere, has many more people, and do not have the same scrutiny applied to their employees.
Interestingly enough, most classified information doesn't get leaked the same way that Snowden leaked his documents. It's mostly due to carelessness. The best example of this is deployment schedules. One of my coworkers was scheduled to go on a Marine Expeditionary Unit (ship that goes around the Pacific just in case something happens). The date of departure was classified. Someone told his wife, who told all of her friends on Facebook. Oops.
If you include contractors whose primary income is from providing services to the NSA, the number of people who had some knowledge of their surveillance is probably approaching half of a million.
But even those contractors are professionals if they get access to anything of value.
Trying to keep a "detain"-button secret, having it manned by thousands of people that only have a high school diploma OR a year of work experience in security/aviation/screening, doesn't sound easy (those are by the way the education requirements for a TSO according to usajobs.gov). Since a leak could stem from a minor overstep of their contract (ohh, I told a buddy about it, big deal right?), and there are frequent policy violations by agents, it does look grim for the existence of such a button.
I heard of them kicking the machines to make them go off though, so there's a "button", and it's public knowledge that they will use it if they want a pat down.
Cops have dogs trained to give false positives on signal and we are constantly spied on and lied to by our own intelligence agencies.
So please don't tell me this idea is far fetched, I think it's very plausible.