News: Pilots want "screening passengers by observation" in Canada
Posted on Sunday, February 03 @ 02:20:04 GMT by darklord |
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OTTAWA -- Two men in their mid-twenties emerge from a cab and head to the airport check-in counter.
Both are neatly trimmed, sporting new clothes and carrying new luggage. Multiple scars on hardened hands suggest they're mechanics or welders.
One has a small, cherry-coloured burn on the back of his left hand - it doesn't look like a heat burn, but more like a liquid chemical burn.
His companion, meanwhile, appears to have dyed the tips of his hair.
A plainclothes security agent watches.
Why are they both in new clothes? And that fresh burn? Maybe it was some spilled car battery acid. Maybe something else. What about the dyed hair?
That's not something working-class men generally do. Hair discoloration, the agent knows, can be caused by prolonged exposure to chemicals.
She decides the men will be quietly pulled aside and asked a few questions.
As the questioning begins, a second agent studies the men's facial expressions, body and eye movements, even vocal pitches.
The men will be taken to a secure area and questioned further by police, have their names run through a criminal records database and government "watch/no-fly" lists.
Scenes like this have long been common in Israel, which pioneered passenger profiling, and since 2003, at a growing number of major airports in the United States.
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration claims its "Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques" or SPOT program has been so successful, it plans this year to double the 600 "behavioural detection officers" patrolling concourses and departure lounges for unusual, anxious or otherwise "suspicious" passenger behaviour.
Without revealing details, the TSA says the officers are trained to discount the typical nervousness, anger and confusion that many travellers legitimately experience. And it insists the officers do not use racial, ethnic or religious profiling.
Following June's botched terrorist attack at Glasgow's airport, the British government announced it, too, is rolling out a hi-tech version of the concept.
Airport surveillance cameras will feed passenger images into a computer program capable of detecting 10,000 separate facial "microexpressions," including signs of fear and deception and, reportedly, even an individual's skin temperature.
Other European airports also are experimenting with the idea.
Now the association representing 2,100 of Canada's pilots at six domestic airlines wants Ottawa to adopt a SPOT-style program.
"We focus our (current) efforts on taking away the pointed objects and I think we do a pretty good job at that," says Capt. Craig Hall, Canadian director of the national security committee of the the Air Line Pilots Association International.
But at the urging of the association and others, Transport Canada is researching what it calls "behaviour pattern recognition" and says it is "interested in learning more . . . and (the) legal implications in a Canadian context."
The Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA), responsible for pre-board screening of passengers and their belongings and explosives detection at airports, declined to comment for this story.
But an independent panel of security and aviation experts that reviewed CATSA operations cautiously recommended to Transport Canada last year that behavioural profiling might work in Canada.
It attached some conditions, including that the concept must be planned and implemented so offensive forms of profiling by frontline personnel are minimized, if not eliminated, and that it not be a substitute for pre-board screening of carry-on luggage.
Reg Whitaker, the aviation security expert who headed the panel, also says the job must not be given to CATSA screening officers, who don't have the training, experience or qualifications to conduct behavioural analysis.
That suggests the government would have to create and fund a whole new airport security regime.
But just how effective is spying on people's expressions and body movements?
The U.S. boasts that between January and December 2006, SPOT stopped 70,000 people for questioning, resulting in upwards of 700 arrests.
But that 1-in-100 hit rate involved alleged money-laundering, drug and weapons possession to immigration violations and outstanding arrests warrants.
None were terrorism related. The TSA notes some did lead to counter-terrorism investigations. But the results are not known and TSA officials did not respond to requests for interviews for this story. "
"My guess is that close to 1 out of every 100 people who go through airports have committed or are committing some kind of offence," Christopher Slobogin, a University of Florida Levin College law professor, said in an interview. "In other words, random selection might produce the same hit rate, without bothering with the expense associated with the program. Since we already subject all passengers and luggage to technological and occasional physical searches, why is such a flawed program needed?"
SPOT supporters counter with the 2001 case of shoe-bomber Richard Reid, who attempted to destroy an American Airlines Boeing 767 on a flight from Paris to Miami by igniting explosives hidden in his shoes.
When Reid arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport with only a light backpack for the overseas trip, a security agent became suspicious and turned him over to French police.
They questioned him extensively, at the airport and later at a hotel after he missed his original flight.
Then they let him go, unaware of the high explosives hidden in his shoes.
There are two lessons in the Reid case, SPOT supporters say: Seemingly minor but nonetheless suspicious behaviour can be a valuable tip-off; secondary questioning must be handled by seasoned interrogators, preferably with behavioural analysis skills.
Ottawa Citizen
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