Israel puts heavy emphasis on human behavioral screening and it's fantastically successful. It seems SPOT is a heavily watered down version. I'm sure all the expensive technology vendors will love to point out SPOT is a failure.
I wouldn't equate the Israeli security with racial profiling. That's a part of it but it mainly involves asking passengers questions and looking for things that are out of the ordinary.
I got stopped leaving Israel once and it wasn't because of racial profiling. I gave them my family's phone number and they called around and it all got resolved.
He says he now avoids peer-reviewed journals because they're read closely by scientists in countries that America considers to be threats.
Wow. Terror as an excuse for draconian policy, I have come to expect. This is the first time I am seeing terror as an excuse for flawed and unscientific 'research'.
The military has its own classified, peer-reviewed journals to provide an outlet for people with legitimate analysis that they'd like to keep out of the hands of foreign agents.
A few years ago when I was about to board a flight to London from Boston, I was grabbed by the arm by a plains-clothed security type immediately before the airline scanned my boarding pass at the jetway.
He flashed his badge and I was pulled to one side, and he asked if his partner could look through my carry on. As she did this, he asked me about where I had been eating in Boston. He asked many, many questions about Santarpio's, saying he'd never heard of it, asking what they sold, etc.
Given that Santarpio's is immediately next to the airport and sells amazing pizza, it's extremely unlikely that someone who worked at Logan was unfamiliar with it.
At this point, the lady looking at my bag said "he's clean" or similar, the first guy lost all interest in Santarpio's, and they put me back in to the front of the queue.
It's basically the last non-airport thing you see before you get to the airport (erm, depending on which of the 4 or so approaches you use to get to the airport, I suppose).
EDIT: it's really good and worth a visit. Get there early and/or be prepared to queue.
...yeah, I figured out that's what they were trying to do, as he kept asking the same inane questions repeatedly in rapid fire.
Turns out my baseline for him was a quizzical "Are you serious?" look on my face.
(I guess maybe that looks different to a "OMG THEY'RE ON TO ME!" reaction.)
A very strange little encounter.
And if it was just "security theatre", I can't imagine the passengers behind me were comforted by someone being snatched from the line, having their bag riffled through and then put back in line just before getting on a 7 hour flight.
Kudos to the person who came up with that title. Those of you who haven't seen the similarly titled movie or read the book are probably baffled, but I assure you, it very nicely sums up the ridiculousness of this particular program of the TSA (a cynic might even go so far as to say it describes the TSA as a whole, but none of us here are cynics, right? Right? Guys...?)
This reminds me of part of Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, which talks about "trained" employees at Staten Island (or other points of entry for immigrants) in the nineteenth century, who could spot mental deficiency by looking at the shape of the head (craniometry, but without measurement, just eyeballing). I'm writing this from memory, so I can't go into detail, and I don't have a link to this particular passage. But a significant number of immigrants were put on boats back to Europe just because of the snap judgment of these spotters.
Paul Ekman's METT and SETT Microexpression Training Tool and Subtle Expression Training Tool, have been in use by many government agencies not just the TSA.
http://www.humintell.com/about-us/
From a washington post article:
"But the day I spent at Logan confirmed for me that SPOT violates no one's civil rights. Few people were identified. Nearly always, the answers to initial questions made further investigation unnecessary. No record was made, and the passenger lost no time.
Observational techniques are not a substitute for all the other techniques we now use to catch would-be terrorists. But they add another layer to transportation security. They are now being used at fewer than one in 10 major U.S. airports. We need to use them everywhere."
How to Spot a Terrorist on the Fly
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10...
To figure this out all you have to do is follow the money. :) I love the last part of the story:
During an interview on Tuesday, General Jabiri challenged a Times reporter to test the ADE 651, placing a grenade and a machine pistol in plain view in his office. Despite two attempts, the wand did not detect the weapons when used by the reporter but did so each time it was used by a policeman.
It reminds me of China, where they have armed guards at train stations "randomly" questioning anyone they "think" might not have the necessary documents to be moving to (living in) that particular city.
The interesting thing about this technique is that unlike most security techniques it actually might work better the more the enemy knows about it.
Imagine the expression on the face of the terrorist as he's thinking "Must not make suspicious-looking micro-facial movements... must not make suspicious-looking micro-facial movements..."
...No scientific evidence exists to support...
...the TSA is "unsure" whether SPOT has ever led to the arrest of an actual, real-life terrorist.
Which probably makes this program fit in perfectly with everything else that TSA is doing.