Airport Security Prize Announced

Reservoir Hill writes "Verified Identity Pass, a firm that offers checkpoint services at airports, has announced a $500,000 award for any solution that will make airport security checks quicker and simpler for passengers. The cash prize will go to any individual, company or institution that can get customers through airport security 15% faster, at a cost of less than 25 cents per passenger, using technology or processes that will be approved by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Passengers must not need to remove their clothes or shoes, something that slows down processing significantly. "We're looking at moving things that are conceptual or in the lab to things that we can deploy," says company spokesman Jason Slibeck and added that over 150 individuals, start-ups, defense contractors and universities have shown an interest in the prize. One promising procedure is mass spectroscopy, which involves analyzing the mass-charge ratio of ions on a swab sample taken from a passenger's clothing or air collected from around them to spot traces of substances including explosives or drugs. The Pre-Registration Package Information Sheet is available online."

how to stop hijackers

[Anonymous Coward]

Put several armed officers on each plane.

Put the door to the cockpit on the OUTSIDE of the plane.

Problem solved. I'll take my money now.

How about.

[Creepy Crawler]

Dogs?

Yeah, trained dogs..

Dogs can smell fear, and many chemical substances. You just have a pack of em and train them to bark ferociously when they "sense" trouble. Police dogs already have that kind of leeway.

Air Marshel and a gun.

[geekoid]

remove first class(shock!)
Put a seat facing the passengers, put an air marshal with a pistol and a shotgun. Give him mirrored shades.

Create a secured cockpit door.

Go back to the more general pre 9/11 security

Profit..I mean Done.

Maybe a lock down code on the auto pilot, so you can land the plane w/o pilot intervention. Auto pilot landing can be, and is more then most people know, done today.

oh, wait, you mean maintain the theater of security and speed it up? no, those two things are opposites.

There is good stuff already out there

[Original Replica]

I recently worked on a gig where many high profile business and political figures were attending. I walked through a SecureScan system. [viewsystems.com] I'm a stagehand, so I had tools on me. I the scan operator could tell the difference between my 8" crescent wrench, my multi-tool, and my Spyderco knife as I walked through at a normal pace. I know because he only asked about my knife, not the other tools.

Re:Eliminate it?

[gnick]

I think this kinda misses the point of a big part of airport security: the airport itself.

Exactly - And it goes further. On 9/11, our planes were a soft target and useful weapons. Now, they're a significantly harder target (of course far from perfect - we've all got schemes that could defeat the security measures - but... harder.) Planes at this point would be very difficult to hijack and fly into buildings, so why would anyone bother trying? If you bomb a plane, you kill a bunch of people, make headlines, and scare the nation/world. But, there are a lot more cost-effective and better risk/benefit alternatives out there for the black-hats. If we want to throw our $$ at preventing attacks on our soil, is there any rational reason (besides placating the tax-paying/voting masses who buy into media-sponsored post-9/11 fear-mongering) for the huge focus on the damned planes?

Re:How about.

[Mr. Flibble]

How about those who are afraid of dogs? Or those who are afraid of flying? That would trigger a great deal of false positives.

Also, I have worked with dogs, and police dogs specifically, and I don't find their purported "detection" ability to be as good as public opinion makes it out to be.

A certain winner

[LatencyKills]

Move the cockpit bulkhead back as far as the first class bathroom and enclose that and the boarding doorway in with the pilots. Board the passengers through another door entirely, and never shall the flight crew and passengers meet. At that point, who cares what happens to the passengers or their security? We'll never have another hijacking again unless someone wants to try and scale the exterior of the aircraft in flight. Good luck with that. As for my prize, I'll take cash in euros. I'm not to thrilled about the state of US money these days.

Re:The purpose is fear

[wumingzi]

The main purpose behind the security is to keep the population frightened and annoyed.

No. That's the purpose behind the ever-popular bad security, popular with tinpot governments and nasty IT departments the world over.

Real security is supposed to let legitimate users get on with their jobs, stopping bad guys in their tracks, and being as invisible as possible.

If you want a good example of real security, go to London Heathrow airport. It's nice. It's pleasant. It's a giant shopping mall where airplanes land. You never see anything there but happy tourists and
the odd lightly armed police officer.

That's an illusion. Hundreds of people are around to make sure that nothing goes sideways there.

I heard a FOAF story about someone who "tripped the alarm" (in this case, walking through a door plainly marked "Do Not Enter")

The results were amazing.

Re:The purpose is fear

[ScoobaDood]

People in power are not afraid on your behalf. People in power want to remain in power. For as long as possible with as much power as possible. This requires some draconian laws to be passed in an apparently democratic society. This in turn requires the population to be kept in a state of fear so that they will not rationally consider propostions but will accept them blindly in case the boogyman gets them. It was ever thus...

Re:Eliminate it?

[gnick]

Are we spending sufficient of our anti-terror effort on things that the enemy have not drawn our attention toward?

Only a little bit. That's what's so frustrating for me. I'm funded full-time working counter-terror. In an area where we're vulnerable and in an area where the terrorists have shown a lot of interest. But, it's an area where we've never seen an attack. So... I have to work in, IMHO, an underfunded security area while watching $$ that could be well spent go to short-sighted initiatives.

I swear I'm not trolling here, just venting, but this post may earn me a couple of /. Freaks. The nonsensical shit behind some of these security decisions almost makes me want a dictator who can make sensible decisions based on the country's needs instead of a bunch of pandering vote-whores who only care about sound-bites. I'm behind democracy and I hate what W has done with his almighty pen, so I'll oppose the shift toward totalitarianism at every turn. But it's stuff like this that makes me pissed off at Americans in general.

Re:Eliminate it?

[bzipitidoo]

* good facial recognition software is not fooled by a change in expression

I don't think so. You have personal experience with such software? Link please! I suspect that the ones not fooled by expressions are the ones that rely heavily on parts of the face that do not change, such as the distances between the eyes, ears, and nose. I would guess those sorts of techniques do not scale well. Not enough measurements to distinguish everyone when the number of faces grows to tens of thousands.

We don't have any Optical Character Recognition software that can match what people can do. Much OCR is pretty bad. Facial recognition is harder. I have also seen some of the work done in facial recognition. Everyone uses their own data sets. Partly that's because many of the techniques need specific sorts of input and can't handle the wide variety of lighting, orientations, expressions, glasses, hair, makeup and so on, so the researchers prepare "suitable" data. But that's cheating, and it is no surprise that their lab results tend to indicate much better performance than they get in field trials. Even if we accept the lab results at (no pun intended) face value, the very best reported results of around a 98% recognition rate are woefully inadequate for sifting through a database of a million people.

This desire of security people for nearly infallible, instantaneous, computer automated facial recognition of millions being available in the next few years is a pipe dream. These are very expensive dreams thanks to people not realizing just how difficult those problems are, and being willing to believe in and finance the sort of fake researchers who are better at theater and blue sky promises than results. They want it so badly they're willing to overlook all sorts of indications they're being sold a load of crap. So that's my recommendation: K.I.S.S., stop giving sinecures to relatives and "friends", stop accepting security through obscurity and using that to justify those sinecures, and learn to recognize theater before wasting money on whiz bang disappointments.

Re:Eliminate it?

[cayenne8]

"Contracts to the Pentagon's top ten contractors jumped from $46 billion in 2001 to $80 billion in 2003, an increase of nearly 75%. Halliburton's contracts jumped more than nine times their 2001 levels by 2003, from $400 million to $3.9 billion. Northrop Grumman's contracts doubled, from $5.2 billion to $11.1 billion, over the same time frame; and the nation's largest weapons contractor, Lockheed Martin, saw a 50% increase, from $14.7 billion to $21.9 billion."

Well it isn't like this money goes to a company into a black hole never to be seen again.

These contracts employ a LOT of US citizens....many of them require the workers to be US citizens possibly with clearances. Those jobs are pretty much offshore-proof.

So, it is money coming back into our economy, and supporting our citizens with high paying, high skilled jobs.

It isn't all bad.