Hang on, America: Having to remove your shoes and belts after waiting in long security lines at the airport just might soon be passé. .
Airport security checkpoints, which have become the bane of travellers' existence, may soon serve as points of contact for behavior screeners wanting to study passengers. Under this new system of brain fingerprinting, the focus of airport security would shift away from examining the content of one's carry-on luggage to analyzing the content of one's emotions.
According to Omer Laviv, the CEO of ATHENA GS3 (an Israeli-based security company) "We are seeing a needed paradigm shift when it comes to security .This brain fingerprinting' is much more developed than we think."".
Because Israel is under constant security threats, that country has emerged as a leader in the development of security technology. Already, several Israeli companies have developed systems that can accurately detect signs of emotional stress, a warning sign that a passenger may have nefarious intentions. That's good news in itself for those of us who want to ride the friendly skies safely, but there's more. These screeners are both faster and less intrusive than the ubiquitous metal detectors, making the dreaded boarding process a little less loathsome.
How does this all work? One firm uses a combination of infra-red technology, remote imagers and sensors, and subliminal images to detects a passenger's reaction to certain stimuli via his body temperature, respiration, and heart rate. The sum total of these readings is used to screen passengers. Eventually, the hope is that a passenger could sail through these security points in an unthinkable 20 to 30 seconds.
With these technologies, the emphasis is on speed and seamlessness. Traditional security profiling can discriminate by race and religion, but security experts are saying behavioral profiling methods like these are more fair, more effective and less expensive.
