After testing their new “chat down” program at Boston’s Logan Airport, the TSA is now expanding it to Detroit’s Metro International Airport. To start, only those flying on Delta Airlines will be subjected to these “chats.”

TSA spokesman Kawika Riley said the program would improve passenger safety.

However, the TSA has not said how this will improve passenger safety, only that it will. They know best so it must.

“TSA has long recognized the value of a layered, threat-based approach to transportation security and the need to focus more of our resources on people who potentially pose a threat to aviation safety, in addition to the system’s current focus on high-risk items,” he said in a written statement. “We will evaluate the impact on security, screening operations and passenger throughput, and determine how to proceed with this program.”

If they valued this then why are they now putting the “chat down” into use and have used it in the past? It’s simply a matter of ratcheting things up to make flying more uncomfortable than it already is. It’s not going to help security at all, just as all the other measures put into place in the last 10 years have done nothing to make the airports any safer than before 9/11.

“Although the (behavior detection observers) may not have interviewed a sufficient number of passengers to yield a statistically significant result … TSA representatives indicated during the briefing that the agency plans on using the results of the pilot to determine whether the ‘assessor’ program should be expanded,” the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), said in a statement this summer.

In English, this means that the behavior detection observers haven’t interviewed enough people so that they can claim the program is working, but it was successful enough that they can now expand the program into Detroit. In other words, they’re refusing to admit that the program doesn’t really work outside of a TV show, but they’re committed into pushing it onto people who don’t know how science works and assumes it’s a legitimate avenue to venture down in protecting Americans.