Loss of Privacy

Keeping you informed on recent losses to privacy and civil rights worldwide.

Browsing Posts tagged SPOT

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.

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In what should come as no surprise, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has said that the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program has no scientific proof [pdf] that it actually works.

The SPOT program utilizes behavior observation and analysis techniques to identify potentially high-risk passengers. GAO analysts provided Congress with information on the extent to which TSA has validated the scientific basis for SPOT and other operational challenges.

“Years after implementing a costly passenger screening program, the Homeland Security agency responsible for protecting the nation’s transportation system failed to detect terrorists at U.S. airports on nearly two dozen occasions,” according to Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch.

As a result the terrorists slipped right through “security” checkpoints and boarded commercial airplanes, according to the GAO report that’s difficult to swallow nearly a decade after the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history.

In 2010 SPOT cost taxpayers nearly $212 million and the Obama Administration wants $232 million for it this year.

But on at least 23 occasions its highly specialized Behavior Detection Officers failed to stop terrorists from boarding planes, investigators found. At least 16 people who were later charged or pleaded guilty to terrorism charges slipped through eight different U.S. airports with SPOT programs, according to the GAO’s findings.

Anyone with a basic education could have seen that such a program was not going to work. There are far too many variables that cannot be taken into account in every single instance of a passenger walking through the airport.

The DHS has agreed to an independent panel that is currently reviewing the viability of the SPOT program.

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Despite numerous reports that the SPOT program doesn’t work as it should, the UK is bringing their own version to British airports.

OVER the past four years, some 3,000 officers in America’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have been specially trained to spot potential terrorists at airports. The programme, known as SPOT, for “Screening Passengers by Observation Technique,” is intended to allow airport security officers to use tiny facial cues to identify people who are acting suspiciously. The British government is currently launching a new screening regime modelled on the Americans’ SPOT. There’s just one problem with all this: there’s no evidence that SPOT is actually effective.

SPOT lies more in the realm of pseudoscience rather than real science. There is no real way to detect if such a program actually works because, under controlled conditions, it is never under the same conditions one would face in the real world. Given the popularity of TV shows, such as Lie to Me, people are rely on the false assumption that SPOT technology actually works.

“No scientific evidence exists to support the detection or inference of future behaviour, including intent,” declares a 2008 report prepared by the JASON defence advisory group. And the TSA had no business deploying SPOT across the nation’s airports “without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment”, stated a two-year review of the programme released on 20 May by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the US Congress.

The bottom line is that, according to the GAO, the TSA is “unsure” whether SPOT has ever led to the arrest of an actual, real-life terrorist. The agency has hired an independent contractor to evaluate the program, and the results are due next year. In the meantime, the TSA will presumably continue to spend taxpayer dollars on a program that it’s not really sure is effective.

Considering the fact that the SPOT program has been in effect for four years, it didn’t stop the underpants bomber when red flags were raised at every step of his journey.

SPOT is nothing more than security theater, just like the Iraq bomb detectors, and The United Kingdom is willing to bring it to their shores at the cost of millions of taxpayer’s money.

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