[Infowarrior] - Will More Eyes Make Us Safer?

[Richard Forno]

NYT - Jet Lagged
http://jetlagged.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/will-more-eyes-make-us-safer/

December 30, 2007,  5:47 pm
Will More Eyes Make Us Safer?

By Clark Kent Ervin

You know the old saw - "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and
statistics." The quip was brought to mind when I glanced at the year-end
Department of Homeland Security fact sheet touting what it's done to make us
safer. Among the featured items was "increasing by more than 175 percent the
number of personnel trained in techniques to identify high-risk passengers
in airports."

Call me cynical, but I always wonder when huge statistical increases are
cited rather than the raw numbers themselves, especially when the statistics
are being cited by government officials. And that goes double when the
officials in question are from the Department of Homeland Security. But it's
not really the numbers that concern me here; it's the program itself.

Since 2003, the Transportation Security Administration has operated a
program called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques). T.S.A.
workers are given four days of classroom instruction and one day of
on-the-job-training in spotting suspicious behavior that might be indicative
of terrorist intent. They then roam airports looking for passengers who
appear unusually nervous or angry or determined, in hopes of preventing the
next would-be Mohammed Atta from carrying out another attack.

I'm not opposed to behavior recognition, in theory. The Israelis have been
using it for years quite successfully. And it makes sense to complement
efforts to spot deadly weapons by concentrating at least some attention on
spotting people with deadly intent. After all, as another old saying goes,
"guns don't kill people; people kill people." And T.S.A. is right that there
should be many layers of security to multiply its chances of catching
terrorists. The agency is also right to introduce more randomness into the
security system, to decrease the chance that terrorist plotters can learn
protocols and procedures well enough to defeat them. Behavior recognition is
nothing if not "random."

But I strongly question whether five days is enough to train anybody in the
intrinsically difficult art-science of behavior detection. And with all due
respect to T.S.A. screeners, they are not Mossad agents. Study after study
has shown them to be incapable of spotting artfully concealed weapons, and
sometimes, even, inartfully concealed ones.

So, what makes us think that screeners who can't tell a bomb component from
a curling iron can all of sudden tell whether the guy with the big frown on
his face is frowning because he's determined to kill infidels today or
because somebody just dropped a suitcase on his foot?

Appearances are, needless to say, in the eye of the beholder. People can
appear to be agitated or nervous for any number of reasons. Some people are
scared of flying. Some people have medical conditions or psychological
disorders that make them sweat or jiggle or otherwise seem oddly out of
place. And, then, the very act of interrogation causes some people who
wouldn't otherwise be agitated or nervous in an airport to become nervous or
agitated. Hardened terrorists, on the other hand, are trained to be as cool
as cucumbers and to blend into their surroundings like lizards on leaves.
So, while screeners are sizing up the hapless sap with the nervous tic, Al
Qaeda operatives are free to go about their deadly business.

Oh, and another thing. It would be interesting to see the racial/ethnic
profile of who's been deemed to be acting suspiciously. If it were to turn
out that most are, or at least appear to be, Arab or South Asian, the
program could wind up doing more harm than good. Such stereotyping would,
rightly, incense the Arab-South Asian-Muslim community at a time when
America needs its support as never before to help root out the tiny minority
of extremists among them. And it would play into the hands of Al Qaeda by
focusing attention on one profile at a time when our intelligence tells us
the terrorist group is seeking to recruit people who don't fit that profile.

So, before I'm comfortable with calling the increase in "B.D.O."'s (Behavior
Detection Officers) a real achievement, I'd want to know a lot more what
they actually do, how they do it, and how well they distinguish between
terrorists and innocents like you and me. Increasing by 175 percent the use
of an even a good idea badly executed is nothing to brag about.


Clark Kent Ervin was the first inspector general of the United States
Department of Homeland Security, where he served from January, 2003 to
December, 2004. He is the Director of the Aspen Institute¹s Homeland
Security Program and the author of ³Open Target: Where America is Vulnerable
to Attack.² He lives in Washington.