Are you talking about mass killings as in multiple murders or are you talking about mass killings such as a bombing?

Oh, I know the answer, I just like trying to get these TSA types to admit that they have a very poor track record.

How do you know there is no difference? You haven't caught enough terrorists to know whether real terrorists act like felons. tourists, or red team members.

Maybe the magical thinking about detecting the fear of failure (intent to for a felonious act) is how you explain and rationalize the red-team success rates of 75%--the red team isn't worried about getting arrested or failing to detonate a bomb, so they don't display as many intent-to-felonize behaviors, and the BDO layer doesn't apply.


The BDO positive predictive power of less than 1% for druggies and identity thieves (or 0/160000 for terrorists worth the name) might compare favorably with homeopathy, but in industrial quality control situations where defect rates of 1-in-a-million or 1-in-a-billion are common, achieveable goals, TSA BDO error rates are poor.

Bolding above to emphasis point.

Why can't a BDO check travel documents?

They get to see, speak and observe each and every person who moves through that station. What better way to get a quick read on how a person is acting.

I think it would be more of a problem with BDO's feeling a job is beneath them.

I'll give you the point of xray, that person is more focused on the view screen.

WTMD, Strip Search Machine would be perfect places to observe behavior.

Surely you TSA types are capable of multi-tasking like people who work in the private sector do.

99.21% of those that BDOs thought warranted an extra screening or questioning had NO nefarious intent.

With a 99.21% failure rate there is no way that anyone can convince me that the BDO program is not based on junk science. I think you would have a better return using phrenology or chiromancy.

I disagree, and I have been there, albeit in different kinds of cases in which the government's case hinged on real classified information. During the discovery phase, a decent defense attorney (who could very well be the prosecuting attorney if this was some sort of civil rights case brought by a wrongfully-accused airport visitor) would request any & all documents the government possessed relevant to the case. When the TSA whined "SSI", the attorney would notify the judge that the government claimed state's secrets and would ask the judge to compel the government to turn over the SSI information. The government would either turn over the materials or would file a state secrets writ. The judge, if he were a federal judge, would have access to any SSI or classified information in dispute or which he believed was relevant to his decision on introduction of SSI materials in the trial. Both attorneys could be cleared to the level of the material and discuss the matter in camera.

Most judges sincerely want justice to be done and take a hard line at the government's insistence to keep relevant classified information out of discovery or the actual trial. SSI doesn't even approach being real classified information. Some day, very soon, I hope, a judge will tell the TSA to deposit their precious SSI in an orifice or two.

When exactly did you live in Germany and for how long? Sounds more like you are ex-military and did a tour there in the 1980's.

One technical observation about the above - the discussion of whether the information sought to be excluded from disclosure would be conducted between the judge and the attorney from the government - not the attorney seeking disclosure on behalf of his/her client.

That said, it an open question whether TSA SSI information would qualify for the State Secrets Exemption in a civil trial.

The state secret privilege encompasses matters (not just communications) which, if disclosed, would:
· Harm the nation's defense capabilities.
· Reveal intelligence gathering methods.
· Disrupt diplomatic relations with foreign governments.

The Supreme Court sustained the privilege in United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953). Although the rationale of Reynolds expressly drew only upon the common law, part of that opinion, as well as other cases, suggest that the privilege has a constitutional basis founded upon the President's duties in the areas of national security and foreign affairs.

To invoke the privilege successfully, the government need only demonstrate that "there is a reasonable danger that compulsion of the evidence will expose military matters which, in the interest of national security, should not be divulged." Reynolds, 345 U.S. at 10.

While I can't find any cases discussing whether SSI would be afforded State Secret-level protection, the government has a fairly easy hurdle to overcome. In Kasza v. Browner, 133 F.3d 1159, C.A.9 (Nev.),1998:

I facilitated redacted classified information disclosure for a qui tam suit in the late 1980s in which both attorneys were present in camera for these discussions. The hearing was delayed for several weeks while the plaintiff's attorney was cleared to the TS/codeword level.

If the judge upholds the government's claims of states secrets during discovery and the government is the prosecutor or the plaintiff, a good defense attorney will file a motion for dismissal. The government will generally drop the charges rather than reveal classified information in court. If the judge refuses the writ of states secrets, and if the government is the prosecutor or the plaintiff, the government will generally drop the case for the same reasons.

If the government is the defendant, the judge will generally rule for the citizen plaintiff or the government will try to settle out of court.

I remember that Judge Brinkman in the Moussaui 20th hijacker case, ruled against the government in a writ of state's secrets petition. It didn't really matter, since Francine the Goolging Lawyer and her employee, Carla Martin, pretty much blew the case on their own.

*****

Bart, there was a link in the post Trolkiller was quoting, as was clearly apparent to anyone who can read. According to the figures in that link, 160,000 people have been harassed by BDOs, and only 1,266 arrests have been made as a result of this harassment, and vast majority of those were for things like fake IDs and drugs, none of which have anything to do with security. 1,266 divided by 160,000 is 0.0079125, which means that Trollkiller is right to say that the BDO has a false positive rate of over 99% and is thus prima facie useless and does nothing to make anyone safer.

Its the Behavior Detection Program that doesn't have the numbers to back it up, Bart.:td::td:

More to the point, though, TK is right, it is junk science.

There are no ex-military, you're either former or retired. Pirmasens 59th Ordinance Brigade (81-84). I lived out in the economy rather than the barracks. It was great and I would have stayed 10 years. ;)

The government must have consented to the presence of the plaintiff's attorney, or they were asleep at the wheel. IMHO, of course.

Correct. But we hardly ever lose. :D

You mean Judge Brinkema, correct?

And you are correct - Francine and Martin blew that case, IIRC. Not a surprise, really.

You were with a brigade that dealt with statutes? ;)

Sounds like you would have gone through APG the same time I was there.

Heh heh heh.

True. I would be more accurate in saying my part of DOJ hardly ever loses. :D

Sorry twinkie, I thought it would be understood the numbers came from the linked article from the poster I quoted. (We are still doing the baked goods nicknames right?)

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/fligh...etection_N.htm

I also used a percentage calculator located at http://www.csgnetwork.com/csgpercent.html

From the article, 160,000 people were subjected to extra scrutiny, of these 15,000 were referred to law enforcement, of the 15,000 referred to law enforcement only 1266 were arrested.

Over all failure rate equals 99.21%, of those that the BDO deemed nefarious enough to refer to a LEO the failure rate equals 91.56%.

^^^Excellent post.

Trollkiller said 'failure rate', (which is itself a fuzzy term), not 'false positive', and your usage is not quite what "false positive" means in detection system statistics.

The "positive predictive value" of (number_of_true_positives)/(number of true_positives+number_of_false_positives) is the term of art for describing how useful the BDO's predictions are and what was quoted in the article. Trollkiller's number of 99.21 is 1-positive_predicted_value and is the percentage that you should rely on a BDO's positive report of sinister activity.

You could think of the positive_predictive_value as the rate of criminality among people who test BDO-positive. If it is significantly higher than the baseline rate of criminality, then the BDOs are doing better than chance.

"False positive" is (number_of_false_positives)/(number_of_false_positives+number_of_true_negative s). So, since 1.46Bpassengers+ were unspotted by BDOs over the 2+ years in the article, the BDO "false positive" rate is only (160,000-1,266)/1460000000=0.0001087219 or 0.01%.

Of course, these metrics completely ignore the difficult to assess "false negative" rate of how many unspotted criminals the BDOs miss. If magic BDO skill is such that they inerrantly picked out the worst 0.01% of passengers, then the false negative rate was zero.

If BDOs have no skill, (i.e, they were like a random Magic-8-ball that said "BDO-positive" 160,000/1,460,000,000=0.01% of the time) then the criminality of the BDO+ people would match the criminality of the BDO-negative people. with a false negative rate of 99.99% the leaving 1266/160,000*(1,460,000,000-160,000)=11,550,984 druggie and ID-thief passengers to be detected by other layers. That would give a BDO false negative rate of 11,550,984/(11,550,984+1266)=99.99%.

A fundamental problem with low-rate detection systems is that there isn't enough actual instances to make the performance metrics very useful. At 2,000,000 passengers per day, one terrorist in 500 days is a 1-in-a-billion rare event. It isn't a problem that visual inspection systems can handle.

(From the article, two years+ of BDOing found 160,000 BDO-positive passengers wth 1266 arrests. From elsewhere, 2,000,000 passengers per day times 2 years = 1.46Bpassengers.)

What does TSA mean when it says BDO is "effective"?

Somewhere around paragraph 3 or 4 my head 'sploded.

Maybe it either looks effective or sounds effective.... without actually being particularly effective. BDO does sound like a personal care product. Eliminate unsightly _________ with BDO! Free, at major airports, nationwide! :rolleyes:

I think it means we can terminate the BDO program and just carry around Magic 8-Balls for the same amount of effectiveness.

Oh wait, 8-Balls are not allowed since they’re filled with more than 100ml of liquid.


http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c2...9f6apg6wm4.jpg

I'm not sure about the ARP but I was PRP and it was a glowing experience.:eek: I was in country for the Ramstein bombing and when Fredrick Kroesen's armoured car was hit by an RPG. That really added a pucker factor when flying in and out of certain "sites".

APG=Aberdeen Proving Ground, the home of the US Army Ordnance School. I guess I went to the closest ordinance school that the Army has, which is the JAG school at the University of Virginia. ;)

ordnance sounds so redneck:) I was strictly aviation and in Germany our unit transported certain ordnance

Sorry.

Wikipedia lays out a nice example here for bowel cancer, but 2 years of TSA's BDO program would have something like:

TP=1266 FP=158,000

FN=???? and TN=1,460,000,000

if you care about druggies, and

TP=<1 FP=160,000

FN=<1? TN=1,460,000,000


...if you care about terrorists.

The fractions are so close to zero or 100% that it is nearly impossible to tell if you are making things better or worse. Including druggies, ID thieves, liars, tax evaders, and speeders is what one would have to do to keep the testers from dying of boredom.

I'll 'splain. Is no time, I'll sum up:
a) 99.21% of people stopped by BDOs are not found to be doing anything wrong. (The "falsely suspected" factor.)
b) 0.79% of the people stopped by BDOs have been found to be doing something illegal. (The "sheer dumb luck" factor.)
c) 0.00000% of the people stopped by BDOs have been found to be terrorists. (The "needle-in-a-haystack" factor.)
d) 0.01% of all the people in airports were stopped by BDOs but were not doing anything illegal. (The "hassle" factor.)
e) there is no way of knowing how many people who were not stopped were doing something illegal (terrorist-related or otherwise).
f) If about 0.79% of the people who go through airports are doing something illegal, then the BDOs "secret powers" are no better than just randomly picking people out of the crowd.

But while we can play statistics all day long, I keep remembering this is an organization that agonizes over whether 3 is, or is not, 3.4, and struggles with fluid ounces versus ounces (weight). :p

When TSA says "BDOs are effective" they mean "it impresses the Kettles to have people asking questions in the airport."

I think you nailed the definition of "effective."

Did you expect anything other than a cute comment? Not that he would have produced any numbers ... :rolleyes:

I do wonder how pervasive anti-social disorders are in TSA. :D

I'm tracking what you're saying, but what I do not understand is how can a concept that has never been used on such massive scale for such a short time be deemed a positive or a negative? The highlighted sentence may be closer to the mark than you think.

The numbers point to the BDO program as a bust. I don't think there is any way to spin it into a positive.

If it were incompetant BDOs that caused the high failure rate there may be a reason to keep the program alive. The fact is the BDOs are not to blame for the voodoo sold to the TSA.

(forgive any spelling errors, I closed the spell checker already)

Data miners, direct marketers, and spammers work with much larger programs on much smaller time scales and deem the results successes or failures all the time.

I thought the highlighted sentence was close to the mark because the "massive scale" of the BDO program is insignificant compared to the problem it pretends to solve.

If BDOs have a superhuman "lift" of 10000%, then the program would miss only 120,000 criminals for every 1266 arrests. But your BDO personnel would probably be smart enough to leave and earn their fortunes playing poker.

^^^

TSA keeps saying "effective". I'm not sure that word means what they think it means.

I play statistics during my day job, but you are right. If they can't get their units right, they aren't much good.

They shift the goalposts so g***amned often, they probably don't know.

Are you sure they actually have a goal?:confused: Maybe that accounts for the shifting- A goalpost forever condemned to wander aimlessly in search of its goal... Tragic.

and another ^ here. :)

emphasis mine: say hello to my 2 best friends :D

So true, we did a mail out on Mon and by Wed the client cancelled the second half because they felt the return was not good enough.