I SHALL NOT THINK BAD THOUGHTS

ITEM: The US Department of Homeland Security says its planned pre-crime system designed to detect "hostile thoughts" in people walking through border posts, airports and public places has been proven a success in tests.

Once called Project Hostile Intent, the system has been renamed the Future Attribute Screening Technologies (FAST) program. It purportedly works by using sensors to measure yr pulse rate, breathing, skin temperature, and fleeting facial expressions to determine if you might be planning on doing something illegal.

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They recently tested 140 paid volunteers at an equestrian centre in Maryland:

Some subjects were told to act shifty, be evasive, deceptive and hostile. And many were detected. "We're still very early on in this research, but it is looking very promising," says DHS science spokesman John Verrico. "We are running at about 78% accuracy on mal-intent detection, and 80% on deception."

Amazing. It's like it's a prerequisite to have NEVER read any George Orwell or Philip K Dick to get a job in the DHS.

There’s about 31 flavors of WRONG about this idea, and that’s before you even get into the privacy/thoughtcrime implications.

It’s true that if you’re going to screen for terrorists at the airport (or anywhere else), behavioral profiling is a better approach than what the TSA has been doing so far – i.e. no-fly lists, banning bottled water and focusing on brown people in turbans wearing Transformers t-shirts. But I seriously doubt that a bunch of sensors linked to a computer app can determine someone’s “intent”, given the poor track record of everything from polygraphs to facial recognition techology. Such technologies aren’t that accurate, and they can even be deliberately defeated if you know how. And I don’t think a technological approach is any less subject to error or abuse than the current human version of behavioral profiling.

Of course, I think hostile thoughts every time they take my water bottle away from me, so I would be against this, wouldn’t I?

Are you pondering what I’m pondering,

This is dF

BONUS TRACK: The first panel in the official DHS literature is worth a close-up:

BAN MY BOOKS, I COULD USE THE SALES BOOST

It’s Banned Books Week, incidentally. And as such, I want to call yr attention to this post by John Mark Ockerbloom, a digital library architect and planner at the University of Pennsylvania, on why it matters that we have a Banned Books Week.

It’s not for the reasons you think. Rather:

Banned Books Week is thus about twin freedoms: the freedom to write about what matters to you, and the freedom to read about what matters to you.

Put another way, it’s not really about the actual books in question.

This is worth mentioning because nitpicky critics who’ll use semantics just to start an argument love to point out that most if not all of the books on the annual ALA list haven’t actually been banned – they’ve just been challenged, and even if the library caves in, it’s not like you can’t get a Harry Potter book at the nearest Wal-mart. Between Borders, Amazon.com and the used book trade, you can get yr hands on just about any book without the assistance of yr local library. And so on.

Okay. Fair call. On the other hand, as Ockerbloom says, that’s not the point. Neither is the argument over why people defend Catcher In The Rye but not, say, The Turner Diaries. And neither is the red herring that libraries have to make editorial decisions because of limited budgets and shelf space.

For my money, Banned Books Week is important because it represents one of the greatest conflicts within human nature: the ideal of free speech vs the natural instinct to suppress “harmful” ideas. The same could apply to film, TV and music, but written language is the source of our culture, and holds a place so sacrosanct that we generally view book-burning as something only a Nazi would do.

That's why books in particular are comparatively the most unregulated medium we have. Hollywood movies come with a ratings system. CDs come with Parental Advisory stickers. Radio and TV have the FCC issuing fines for showing nipples. Books have none of these things.

That’s real ultimate power. And that’s worth dedicating an entire week to commemorate not the books that people have tried to protect us from, but the ideals of free expression that books embody better than any other medium.

Out of print,

This is dF