Warning: Women with PMS, police will soon have a stress-scanning camera
Chinese scientists are developing a mini-camera to scan crowds for highly stressed individuals, offering law-enforcement officers a potential tool to spot would-be suicide bombers.
So anyone that's stressed out like a woman on PMS or any male or female that is worried about bills, debts, bad relationships etc., will be targeted by law enforcement. What about the thousands of people on anti-depressants or anyone with Lyme tick disease, this is beyond ludicrous!
You can bet DHS, local police everywhere will soon want them.
Security officers deployed in a busy bus station would need to filter a tremendous amount of data and process it in a short amount of time. Such computing power is not available in smartphone-sized devices, so officers would need to send the information to analysts off-site, over a Wi-fi network, which introduces a new set of challenges.
But the technology has raised concerns over its implications for individual privacy and potential abuse by government agencies.
Stress has a range of effects on the body. It can register as changes in heart rate, facial expression and body temperature, which scientists can already monitor from a distance. But the readings are not always reliable. For example, with enough practice, a person can learn to control their heartbeat.
That's why Chen Tong , an associate professor of electronic information engineering at Southwest University in Chongqing looked at another indicator - the level of blood oxygenation. Using hyperspectral imaging, which examines information across the electromagnetic spectrum, Chen and his research team have developed a "stress sensor" that measures the amount of oxygen in blood across exposed areas of a body, such as the face. "The higher the mental stress, the higher the blood oxygenation," he said.
"They all looked and behaved as ordinary people but their level of mental stress must have been extremely high before they launched their attacks. Our technology can detect such people, so law enforcement officers can take precautions and prevent these tragedies," Chen said.
Officers looking through the device at a crowd would see a mental "stress bar" above each person's head, and the suspects highlighted with a red face.
But Li Jiancheng, a resident in Shanghai's Pudong district, said he worried the technology would be abused by the authorities. "The technology can be used on terrorists, but harmless people such as petitioners and protesters could be the target as well. I would feel uncomfortable and tense if a police officer stared at me through strange goggles," he said.
Really is this what the world is coming to? Cameras & police computers called predictive policing are in use today. If you guessed a private corporation, (Rand) is behind predictive policing & profiting handsomely you get a gold star.
Tech companies are furiously investing in wearable gadgetry that is primarily being marketed for health and fitness, but willingly records a user's information. Could these wearable devices become easily integrated into the pre-crime police grid once a large segment of the population wears them, similar to the pervasive use of other smart gadgets? On the other side, even if one chooses to opt out (while you still can) of these gadgets, could Google Glass-type devices also be modified to become remote stress sensors for police use? In fact, Google Glass already been modified to read brain waves.
The predictive policing model is deceptive and problematic because it presumes that data inputs and algorithms are neutral, and therefore that the information the computer spits out will present police officers with objective, discrimination-free leads on where to send officers or deploy other resources.
This couldn't be farther from the truth.
As Ronald Bailey wrote for Reason, "The accuracy of predictive policing programs depends on the accuracy of the information they are fed." Many crimes aren't reported at all, and when it comes to the drug war, we know for certain that police don't enforce the law equally.
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1571573/new-eye-terror-spotting-stressed-faces-crowd