"Airport screening to look at passenger behavior"

Sunday, December 4, 2005

Airport to test new passenger screening system based on behavior
The Associated Press


MINNEAPOLIS - Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport will begin testing
next month of a new passenger-screening system that gives greater weight to
how people act than to what they're carrying.

Airport police said Saturday that a unit trained by former Israeli airport
security experts in "behavioral pattern recognition" will begin work in
January. The unit will work with the Transportation Security Administration,
which began testing a similar system at the airport last month.

The announcement follows one Friday from the TSA that said travelers could
resume carrying items such as small scissors and screwdrivers on planes
starting Dec. 22.

It makes sense to focus on people instead of what's in their pockets, said
Jim Welna, deputy federal security director for the Twin Cities, Rochester
and St. Cloud airports.

"We're looking for a needle in a haystack every day," he said. "And most
days, the needle is not there."

The new units, he said, will look for anxious, frightened or deceptive
behaviors. Travelers who arouse suspicion will be questioned, and their
answers will be scored against a secret index. When people scores high,
screeners will call airport police, who would then decide whether to ask the
travelers more questions, call counterterrorism agents, or allow them to go
on their way.

Welna said Minneapolis is the second large U.S. airport to test the new
system, called Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT.
Boston's Logan International Airport was the first.

Rafi Ron, a former Israeli airport security expert, helped design the
program in 2002 and his company began training Twin Cities airport police in
October 2004.

Local teams have used the techniques on a "random basis" since then, airport
police Lt. Shawn Chamberlain said. He said he was unaware of them catching
any potential terrorists, but he said the system improves police work.

Ron told a congressional subcommittee in 2002 that passenger profiling
methods have been used successfully for three decades in Israel.

The Air Line Pilots Association has endorsed the program.

But the American Civil Liberties Union is concerned, saying such profiling
systems may violate privacy rights while providing only dubious security
benefits.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit three years ago over the use of "drug courier
profiles," said Charles Samuelson, executive director of the ACLU in
Minnesota. The profiles are used to spot "mules" who carry drugs between
cities.

"Our problem with these observation techniques is that we suspect ... the
criteria are incredibly flexible," he said. "Their profile is basically to
stop black people, stop people of color."

The U.S. Supreme Court, however, has upheld the constitutionality of such
"pretextual stops," deferring to the expertise of law enforcement.

Welna says some countries might find ethnicity or religious beliefs to be
useful components of their profiling programs, but not the United States.

"The selection criteria do not use race, ethnicity, as determining factors.
In addition, the selection criteria do not use religion, gender, or national
origin," he said.

Reports must be filed on each passenger who is referred for secondary
screening, and at some point the TSA will commission a study to determine if
SPOT has an unfair impact, Welna said.


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