Are you always in a cheerful mood when you get on a plane? Half the time I get on one I’m hungover, so it probably won’t affect me all that much, but get a load of this:

Baggage searches are SOOOOOO early-21st century. Homeland Security is now testing the next generation of security screening — a body scanner that can read your mind.

Most preventive screening looks for explosives or metals that pose a threat. But a new system called MALINTENT turns the old school approach on its head. This Orwellian-sounding machine detects the person — not the device — set to wreak havoc and terror.

MALINTENT, the brainchild of the cutting-edge Human Factors division in Homeland Security’s directorate for Science and Technology, searches your body for non-verbal cues that predict whether you mean harm to your fellow passengers.

Orwellian indeed. But there are certain tell-tale signs of intent that it will pick up:

It has a series of sensors and imagers that read your body temperature, heart rate and respiration for unconscious tells invisible to the naked eye — signals terrorists and criminals may display in advance of an attack.

So a pissed-off sick person with a fever, hypertension and a fear of flying could very well be wrestled to the ground and arrested because MALINTENT picked up on the non-verbal cues his body was emitting.

DHS, of course, disagrees:

This whole security array — the scanners and screeners who make up the mobile lab — is called “Future Attribute Screening Technology” — or FAST — because it is designed to get passengers through security in two to four minutes, and often faster.

If you’re rushed or stressed, you may send out signals of anxiety, but FAST isn’t fooled. It’s already good enough to tell the difference between a harried traveler and a terrorist. Even if you sweat heavily by nature, FAST won’t mistake you for a baddie.

Forgetting for a moment that a professional security expert and part-time journo used the term “baddie” to describe a terrorist, the idea that any technology–let alone mind-reading technology–is perfect from the start only passes the laugh test because one is too preoccupied fighting off the tears from crying.

According to the article, this device was rigorously tested on…wait for it…144 “average Joes” in D.C. to test for errors.  I think that is a great representative sample, given that (according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association) there are 700 million passengers on 60 million flights per year in the United States.

But the coup de grâce on my intelligence and sensibilities came at the end of the piece:

And because FAST is a mobile screening laboratory, it could be set up at entrances to stadiums, malls and in airports, making it ever more difficult for terrorists to live and work among us.

Burns noted his team’s goal is to “restore a sense of freedom.” Once MALINTENT is rolled out in airports, it could give us a future where we can once again wander onto planes with super-sized cosmetics and all the bottles of water we can carry — and most importantly without that sense of foreboding that has haunted Americans since Sept. 11. (emphasis added for sickening effect)

Yes, because being harassed for my mood is worth getting that 32oz bottle of Dasani on a flight.

Free at last! Free at last! THANK GODALMIGHTY! We are free at last!

Hat tip: Ben Friedman

Filed under: Profiles in Governance, The Homeland, Daily Rant