Phillip K. Dick's short story, Minority Report, later made into a hit movie with starring Tom Cruise and Max von Sydow, tells the story of a law enforcement program set up to prevent crimes by predicting future criminal acts. The story centers on a man who believes he is falsely accused and must prove he is innocent of a crime he hasn't yet committed. More importantly, the story raises the moral question of whether a person should be punished for a crime they have not yet committed.
Unfortunately, the question may not be hypothetical. The Department of Homeland Security is working on Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), a program designed to monitor physiological and behavioral clues to identify potential terrorists. The concept is to look for statistical aberrations in body language, heart and respiration rates, etc. and use the results as predictors of future behavior.
While one can argue that this program merely automates what we've been training security people to do for years, removing human judgement from process may create a self-fulfilling prophecy. We have a tendency to believe in what computers tell us, even if we know the result to be intuitively wrong.
In a deeply thoughtful article on FAST and the false-positive paragraph, masters candidate Alexander Furnas demonstrates that the large number of false positives will actually aid terrorists by diverting security resources to resolve these false positives.In essence, the real terrorists will get lost in the crowd of innocent travelers singled out for additional screening.
Security expert Bruce Schneier looks at the problem from a slightly different perspective that should give us pause, "If FAST determines you are guilty of a crime you have not yet committed, how do you exonerate yourself?"
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