Comment by grumbelbart2
9 hours ago
Israel is using those methods in their airport security, quite successfully given their threat level. The problem is that it does not scale well and requires very well trained and attentive personnel.
9 hours ago
Israel is using those methods in their airport security, quite successfully given their threat level. The problem is that it does not scale well and requires very well trained and attentive personnel.
I have not been recently to Israel, so I do not know if there have been any changes in their system.
However, some time ago, for a few years I had been a frequent flyer into Israel.
In my opinion their system of airport security seemed far more efficient than what is now typical in Europe and immensely better than the circus that seems typical for USA.
The disadvantage is as you said, that their system requires numerous well trained personnel.
At least at that time, their system had very little emphasis on physical searching and luggage scanning, but it was based mainly on interviewing the traveler, normally by 2 different agents.
During a great number of security checks, my luggage has been searched only once, and it was definitely my fault. That flight was at the end of an extremely busy day and I was very tired, so I just wished for the security check to end as quickly as possible, to be able to finally rest in the plane. My impatience was transparent, which made me suspicious, leading to this singular case of physical searching, instead of just psychological assessment.
These guys turn up a number of "false positives" and use those backrooms to abuse Palestinian travelers.
No. They might believe it works quite well, though, but they're seriously mistaken.
My old neuroscience lab was approached 20 years ago by a three-letter agency looking to develop a rapid reaction time tool to measure the trustworthiness of new people in time-critical hostile situations.
Because of that proposal, I reviewed the literature on "lie" detector tests and their ilk. The evidence is great for them measuring stress, and flimsy for them measuring deception. Normal people get nervous when questioned. Psychopaths may show less autonomic responses. People can train to alter their stress levels. Data interpretation varies wildly by operator, as does accuracy. The only real value is trying to convince criminals they work, in the hopes they make a true mistake or confess.
tl;dr The accuracy is really low, and anyone arguing otherwise is trying to fool the criminals, trying to fool agencies into buying their equipment, or fooling themselves.