Automated profiling tech is crap, says Home Office
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Automated passenger profiling is rubbish, the Home Office has conceded in an amusing - and we presume inadvertent - blurt. “Attempts at automated profiling have been used in trial operations [at UK ports of entry] and has proved [sic] that the systems and technology available are of limited use,” says home secretary Jacqui Smith in her response to Lord Carlile’s latest terror legislation review.
Furthermore, when the security services stopped trying to let the machines figure out who was a threat and went back to traditional “inituitive” stops, they were more effective. “Intelligence improved during the trials when officers reverted to the traditional intuitive methods, albeit applied in the context of intelligence provided by the security service,” says Smith. “It is likely that with more effective use of intelligence, and possibly some behavioural analysis training the quality of intelligence retrieved from persons of interest will improve and the number of people stopped will decrease.”
The Home Office’s belated discovery that human beings acting on sound intelligence make for better policing does however raise questions about the future operation of its E-Borders programme. This is intended to track people in and out of the country, and to operate in conjunction with Advanced Passenger Data (API) and Passenger Name Records (PNR) collected via Project Semaphore. As Home Office minister Joan Ryan told Parliament in March of last year, “In January 2007 23 successes were recorded by Project Semaphore as a result of automated profiling based on passenger data.”
23. Out of how many thousands of travelers profiled they dare not say, nor do they say how many of those 23 were for unpaid parking tickets and the like.
Yep, crap alright.
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