[Infowarrior] - New airport agents check for danger in fliers' facial expressions

[Richard Forno]

New airport agents check for danger in fliers' facial expressions
By Kaitlin Dirrig | McClatchy Newspapers

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/18923.html

WASHINGTON ‹ Next time you go to the airport, there may be more eyes on you
than you notice.

Specially trained security personnel are watching body language and facial
cues of passengers for signs of bad intentions. The watcher could be the
attendant who hands you the tray for your laptop or the one standing behind
the ticket-checker. Or the one next to the curbside baggage attendant.

They're called Behavior Detection Officers, and they're part of several
recent security upgrades, Transportation Security Administrator Kip Hawley
told an aviation industry group in Washington last month. He described them
as "a wonderful tool to be able to identify and do risk management prior to
somebody coming into the airport or approaching the crowded checkpoint."

The officers are working in more than a dozen airports already, according to
Paul Ekman, a former professor at the University of California at San
Francisco who has advised Hawley's agency on the program. Amy Kudwa, a TSA
public affairs specialist, said the agency hopes to have 500 behavior
detection officers in place by the end of 2008.

Kudwa described the effort, which began as a pilot program in 2006, as "very
successful" at identifying suspicious airline passengers. She said it had
netted drug carriers, illegal immigrants and terrorism suspects. She
wouldn't say more.

At the heart of the new screening system is a theory that when people try to
conceal their emotions, they reveal their feelings in flashes that Ekman, a
pioneer in the field, calls "micro-expressions." Fear and disgust are the
key ones, he said, because they're associated with deception.

Behavior detection officers work in pairs. Typically, one officer sizes up
passengers openly while the other seems to be performing a routine security
duty. A passenger who arouses suspicion, whether by micro-expressions,
social interaction or body language gets subtle but more serious scrutiny.

A behavior specialist may decide to move in to help the suspicious passenger
recover belongings that have passed through the baggage X-ray. Or he may ask
where the traveler's going. If more alarms go off, officers will "refer" the
person to law enforcement officials for further questioning.

The strategy is based on a time-tested and successful Israeli model, but in
the United States, the scrutiny is much less invasive, Ekman said. American
officers receive 16 hours of training ‹ far less than their Israeli
counterparts_ because U.S. officials want to be less intrusive.

The use of "micro-expressions" to identify hidden emotions began nearly 30
years ago when Ekman and colleague Maureen O'Sullivan began studying
videotapes of people telling lies. When they slowed down the videotapes,
they noticed distinct facial movements and began to catalogue them. They
were flickers of expression that lasted no more than a fraction of a second.

The Department of Homeland Security hopes to dramatically enhance such
security practices.

Jay M. Cohen, undersecretary of Homeland Security for Science and
Technology, said in May that he wants to automate passenger screening by
using videocams and computers to measure and analyze heart rate,
respiration, body temperature and verbal responses as well as facial
micro-expressions.

Homeland Security is seeking proposals from scientists to develop such
technology. The deadline for submissions is Aug. 31.

The system also would be used for port security, special-event screening and
other security screening tasks.

It faces high hurdles, however.

Different cultures express themselves differently. Expressions and body
language are easy to misread, and no one's catalogued them all. Ekman notes
that each culture has its own specific body language, but that little has
been done to study each individually in order to incorporate them in a
surveillance program.

In addition, automation won't be easy, especially for the multiple variables
a computer needs to size up people. Ekman thinks people can do it better.
"And it's going to be hard to get machines that are as accurate as trained
human beings," Ekman said.

Finally, the extensive data-gathering of passengers' personal information
will raise civil-liberties concerns. "If you discover that someone is at
risk for heart disease, what happens to that information?" Ekman asked. "How
can we be certain that it's not sold to third parties?"

Whether mass-automated security screening will ever be effective is unclear.
In Cohen's PowerPoint slide accompanying his aviation industry presentation
was this slogan: "Every truly great accomplishment is at first impossible."
McClatchy Newspapers 2007

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