The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has begun field testing new technology designed to identify people who intend to commit a terrorist act.
Nature reported that the DHS has been conducting tests of Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) in the past few months at an undisclosed location in the northeast.
The technology uses remote sensors to measure physiological properties, such as heart rate and eye movement, which can be used to infer a person’s current mindset.
According to a Privacy Impact Assessment (PDF) released by the DHS in 2008, the technology is intended to measure a person’s malintent — the intent to cause harm.
“Behavioral scientists hypothesize that someone with malintent may act strangely, show mannerisms out of the norm, or experience extreme physiological reactions based on the extent, time, and consequences of the event,” the report stated. “The FAST technology design capitalizes on these indicators to identify individuals exhibiting characteristics associated with malintent.”
The DHS has claimed accuracy rates of around 70 percent, but some scientists have questioned the results.
“Even having an iris scan or fingerprint read at immigration is enough to raise the heart rate of most legitimate travellers,” Tom Ormerod, a psychologist in the Investigative Expertise Unit at Lancaster University, told Nature.
John Verrico, a spokesman for the DHS, said he could not comment on the performance of FAST because the results were still being analyzed and that additional tests would continue to be conducted.
2020 Election
John Oliver details just how weak Trump’s claim is that he ‘won’ — then he humiliates actor Jon Voight
"Last Week Tonight" host John Oliver confessed that he didn't want to be talking about the 2020 election again, but there was too much to deal with.
"Instead, we have to talk about this as*hole," said Oliver pointing to a photo of President Donald Trump. Typically, when a president loses, the country moves on, but not in Trump's America.
Oliver found the most disappointing piece of Trump's refusal to let go comes from people like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. This week he refused to accept the election results, despite, Oliver said, being the guy who's "supposed to denounce coups."
There were a number of red states that Democrats hoped that they would win either the presidential race or a Senate race, only to lose when Election Day came. But in long-shot states like Arizona and Georgia, Democrats excelled. CNN's senior political analyst Ron Brownstein explained what was different between Arizona and Georgia compared to Iowa and North Carolina.
While Brownstein explained that "Scranton Joe" made some inroads with white non-college-educated voters, it wasn't enough to overcome deficits in states like Iowa and Ohio.
"More significant was their inability to win any state in a Senate race that Trump carried at the presidential level," he continued. "It's a clear message in that if you contrast what happened in Iowa and South Carolina and North Carolina -- states where they spent a fortune on television but ultimately lost the state -- to what happened in Arizona and Georgia where they flipped the state of the presidential level after years of grass-roots organizing, I think there's a clear path forward for Democrats."
President Donald Trump's lawyers haven't done well in their cases to stop counting ballots in states or claims of voter fraud and intimidation. Every case that Trump's lawyers have launched lost except one: allowing Republican observers to stand closer to the tables.
In their latest case, "attorneys filed a revised version of the lawsuit, removing allegations that election officials violated the Trump campaign’s constitutional rights by limiting the ability of their observers to watch votes being counted," said the Washington Post.
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