By David Brinn - Israel 21c
Not many terrorists walk into an airport waving a banner announcing who they are. They don't carry handguns or try to conceal explosives as they debark from an international flight into the United States. And just as rarely do they have police records.
So how can airport officials go about identifying potential terrorists? A new solution is Israel's Suspect Detection Systems (SDS) - a company that has developed an advance automated filtering tool for identifying potential suspects with hostile intentions among masses of tens of thousands visitors.
Consider it a personal polygraph machine, that will make air travelers infinitely safer, says SDS CEO Shabtai Shoval, a former division manager at Comverse Technology who founded SDS along with former head of the Israel Police's polygraph division Yeshayahu Horowitz and former deputy Mossad chief Amiram Levin. "Our system makes an initial assessment within three minutes. If the system identifies a suspect, he can be sent to a personal agent to complete the investigation," Shoval said.
Built to replace human selectors or random check ups of visitors, the SDS-VR-1000 is a device based on the assumption that sophisticated terrorists might not be included in suspect lists and will not carry weapon or explosives when they approach a checkpoint. It is based on the belief that the terrorist's fear will be reflected in measurable psycho-physiological parameters.
"We have the technology to use artificial intelligence in software to imitate polygraph capabilities. It took a long time - two years - and lots of trial and error, but we've achieved a success rate of 95%," said Shoval.
The way it works is that the passenger approaches the machine - they put their passport on a scanner and their other hand on a sensor. He is then presented with an array of written questions in the language indicated by the passport (or in an audio mode with earphones if requested). A special detector then measures physiological responses.
"What is does is collect objective data out of the passenger's ID - and it analyzes the data compared to the subjective data it collects while the passenger is asked different questions," said Shoval. "The process takes approximately three minutes, and the passenger either receives a transfer printout authorizing him to advance to the next stage of entry to the country, or an announcement that he is required for further questioning. A monitoring official will then escort the passenger to another area for further questioning. It's like a robot selection process - we don't make the decision to take someone out of line and put him in jail - we only take someone for further investigation. There's no profile selecting and no human rights violations," he said. "We've created a single-track minded machine - it can do just one task - ID a terrorist."
The system has been approved by the Israeli security apparatus, and an experimental version is going to be tested this year in an American airport.
According to Shoval, the SDS system is a truly unique product, one that could only have been developed in the cultural and political climate of Israel.
Courtesy http://www.israel21c.org/