"Oakland International Airport lacks security technology, experts say"

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Airport lacks security tech, experts say
Video surveillance tools could thwart breaches
By Erik N. Nelson
The Oakland (CA) Tribune


Oakland International Airport lacks video surveillance technology used in
other airports, such as the ability to quickly retrieve images of intruders
and a system that alerts authorities when people enter secure boarding areas
through exit lanes. 

That technological gap may have contributed to the airport's three apparent
security breaches this year, security experts, airport authorities and
sources who supervised security efforts at the airport, said. 

In the most recent incident, on July 10, an aide for the Alameda County
Sheriff's Office reported seeing a man entering the "sterile" Terminal 1
boarding area through an exit lane guarded by the federal Transportation
Security Administration. 

Searchers from the Oakland Police Department and the Sheriff's Office were
given only a verbal description, as the terminal lacks the ability to
retrieve video images to track down intruders. 

Nor did the TSA have "enough information to necessitate an evacuation" of
the terminal, said administration spokesman Nico Melendez. 

The situation was nearly identical to two previous incidents at Oakland -
one on Jan. 5 and a second on Feb. 15 - when people entered secure areas
without being screened for weapons and authorities could not locate them. 

That is something Steve Irwin finds troubling. 

Irwin, who has been a mid-level airport manager and supervisor at both
Oakland and San Francisco international airports, is now a security
consultant based in St. Louis. 

He believes the Oakland breaches are the fruit of airport management's
reluctance to invest in the kind of security systems needed to both prevent
such incidents and deal with them if and when they occur. 

With what little surveillance capability the airport does have, Irwin said,
"It appears they can't translate it into, 'There's a guy in the crowd, let's
get him.'" 

Melendez said the airport's Terminal 2, which is used exclusively by
Southwest Airlines, does have the ability to capture images that can be used
to help track down intruders, but Terminal 1 does not. 

Nor does the airport have what's known in the industry as a "counterflow
detector," which analyzes video images and transmits an alarm when someone
walks into the secure area through an exit. 

San Francisco International Airport installed motion detectors to perform
that function about 10 years ago, airport spokesman Michael McCarron said in
an e-mail. 

"If someone should enter the exit lane from the wrong direction (from the
non-secured side) an alarm sounds, lights flash and a photo is taken of the
individual," he said. That digital image "can either be printed out or sent
electronically anywhere in the terminal." 

San Francisco also has had three incidents in which people entered the
secure area without being properly screened, but none of those were through
exit lanes. In only one case did authorities fail to locate the person and,
following security protocol, order a terminal evacuation and re-screening of
passengers, McCarron said. 

Oakland's Terminal 1 does, in fact, have closed-circuit television
surveillance, said Steve Grossman, who runs the airport for the Port of
Oakland as its director of aviation. 

"We actually have a CCTV system throughout the terminals. That is in the
process of being upgraded as we speak to gain more capability," Grossman
said. 

Asked why searchers for the recent intruder were not provided with images
from that system, Grossman said the system can't always provide them. 

"It depends upon where the incident is, what's going on and how much of it
we capture," he said. "When we capture an image, I do believe we can print
it out. It's a question of, in any one location, do we have a camera there
to capture it." 

As for a wrong-way motion detection system like San Francisco's, Grossman
said, "We don't have it now. 

"In some ways, I wish I had their money. But we will be looking at it for
the future." 

Installing a state-of-the art video detection system for an airport the size
of Oakland could cost around $3 million, including computerized analysis
that can differentiate between animals or people approaching the facility's
perimeter, people moving in the wrong direction at an exit or even someone
acting oddly, said Gadi Talmon, co-founder of Agent Video Intelligence, an
Israeli firm that has installed such systems at Washington's Reagan National
Airport and the Houston Metro transit system. 

That would include a minimum of 500 cameras, each with its own processor to
do initial analysis that decides whether to send high-resolution suspect
images to a more powerful central computer for further analysis. 

"The bottom line is that nobody is watching all those monitors," Talmon
said. "It's just impossible to monitor all those hundreds of cameras.
Computerized systems can detect events according to predetermined rules" and
then quickly convey suspicious images to airport authorities. 

Oakland Police Lt. Ed Poulson led the department's security contingent
inside Oakland's two passenger terminal until the department redeployed his
officers to improve policing in high-crime city neighborhoods July 14. 

He said the airport security environment was already complex, with city
police on the inside, county sheriff's deputies on the outside, federal
passenger screeners from TSA and privately contracted security guards. 

Poulson did not bemoan the lack of high-tech surveillance, saying his
officers could perform well with the tools they had, but said it could
certainly help the new force of sheriff's deputies. 

"Anytime you can use technology to assist law enforcement, that's always a
good thing," Poulson said. "Look at how effective the technology has been
used in England," where widespread use of video surveillance helped British
authorities crack subway bombing plots in 2005. 

At Nashville International Airport, which has less than two-thirds of
Oakland's annual volume of 14.4 million passengers, has video surveillance
throughout its two terminals in case someone bypasses security, explained
Duane McGray, who recently retired as head of that airport's security. 

"They would capture the individual's image, then send that digitized
photograph to an e-mail address (on personal digital assistants carried by
airport police officers) instantly, so that each of the officers can pull it
up and have it in their hand as they look for the individual," McGray said.
He added, "Very rarely has someone gotten through; probably less than one
every year or 18 months." 

There was one time when the digital images came in handy, however, said
McGray, who is now executive director of the Airport Law Enforcement
Agencies Network. "What they did do once is they caught a shoplifter."

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