You Mean I Don’t Have to Take my Shoes Off Anymore?

My sometime drinking buddy Allison Barrie has posted an article about MALINTENT, which despite its rather sinister name is a scanner that will read the evil intentions behind even the most innocent pair of blue eyes.

“So here’s how it works. When the sensors identify that something is off, they transmit warning data to analysts, who decide whether to flag passengers for further questioning. The next step involves micro-facial scanning, which involves measuring minute muscle movements in the face for clues to mood and intention.

“Homeland Security has developed a system to recognize, define and measure seven primary emotions and emotional cues that are reflected in contractions of facial muscles. MALINTENT identifies these emotions and relays the information back to a security screener almost in real-time.”

This year I’ve spent more time in airports than ever before, which means I’ve spent colossal amounts of time standing passively in line, holding my contact lens solution in its plastic baggie and waiting for the command to remove my shoes.

If MALINTENT performs as advertised, we can stop a lot of the scanning and security theater, because the focus will be where it should have been all along, on the individual passenger instead of on all the crap that people carry onto aircraft.

Maybe we’ll even see a return to the good old days, when I could swing onto an aircraft with a bottle of shampoo in my carry-on, snugged up right next to the bottle of tequila.

MALINTENT is one of the goodies soon to appear from the Science and Technology Directorate, where Jay Cohen has shuffled a lot of taxpayer dollars into radical technologies with the possibility of long-range payoffs.

Smart guy, that Admiral Cohen.