The US government is determined to introduce their SPOT program on August 15 at Boston’s Logan International airport, yet it is doomed to fail because it still hasn’t made improvements since it was first introduced. The SPOT program will utilize what are known as Behavior Detection Officers. These BDOs will have 13 days of training before using their new skills on the general public.
The program has come under intense scrutiny as far back as 2007. Critics continue to voice their concerns.
It requires screeners to make quick reads of whether passengers pose a danger or a terror threat based on their reactions to a set of routine questions.
“I’m not convinced that the TSA has good enough people to make the Israeli approach work on a large scale,” said Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who has followed the TSA at his blog, Instapundit.com.
But he noted, “Almost anything would be an improvement over the clown show we’ve got now.”
“It’s an ineffective waste of taxpayer dollars that has the potential and the reality of leading to profiling based on race and ethnicity,” said Massachusetts ACLU executive director Carol Rose, who dismissed SPOT as “security theater.”
There are also numerous concerns about the types of questions being asked.
Under the SPOT program, as passengers hand over their boarding passes and identification, specially trained agents will ask three to four questions — from “Where have you been?” to “Do you have a business card?” and “Where are you traveling?” — while looking for “micro expressions,” such as lack of eye contact, that might hint at nefarious intent.
Suspicious individuals will be pulled aside for more questioning, full-body scans and pat-downs. If the encounter escalates, agents will call in state police.
What is the point of asking, “Where have you been?” when you are an American who is boarding a plane to fly somewhere? If they are only going to ask this of foreigners, then they are omitting a large section of the public who might have done something and are fleeing the country. This is simple profiling.
Asking if someone has a business card is stupid. It doesn’t accomplish anything. Anyone can make business cards. By the time the TSA checks to see if it’s real, the person is long gone. You can also answer, “Yeah, I do, but I’m on vacation and didn’t bring them with me.”
Why ask where you are traveling? That is an asinine question. Not only is it written on the boarding pass, but, even if the person were some sort of terrorist, they’re not going to flub this question.
Numerous people are going to be needlessly pulled for extra security because behavior detection doesn’t work on such a large scale. There are far too many variables to make it viable and the TSA workers will never have enough training to learn to use it properly or effectively.
Here are a few of the people who will end up being pulled aside for further screening due to these new methods.
People with social anxieties and who are just nervous nellies in every day life. These include, people who don’t like others in their personal space, stammerers, stutterers, and quiet, shy, and/or socially awkward people.
People who don’t normally look other people in the eye. In some cultures, this is a sign of confrontation and something never done.
People who have just gotten off a 19 hour flight and have no idea what time it really is anymore. They tend to walk around for a while in a daze until they adjust to their new environment.
People who generally think that they don’t have to answer such questions. If this is such a free country, why does anyone have to document where they’ve been on a vacation? A person may simply be trying to argue this point. The TSA will see it as a threat.
At Logan, about 70 agents — all with college degrees — are undergoing training by an international consulting firm that includes a four-day classroom course and 24 hours of on-the-job experience, said TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis.
Having a college degree does not guarantee smarter people conducting these searches nor does it guarantee that the TSA agent will automatically grasp the task at hand. This course will barely cover the basics of what is expected. What you can expect is more false positives, more security theater, and more of a mess at the airports.
Lie to Me was a fictional television show. It doesn’t work this way in real life. The Behavior Detection program is simply another means of government harassment. Without proper training, these BDOs will continue to stopping children, old men with ostomy bags, and little old grandmas who aren’t remotely a threat. It won’t work as it should and we’ll still see knives and guns getting past security.
