pnwmom Donating Member (1000+ posts) Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Thu Nov-18-10 07:22 PM
Original message
ACLU says NO to Israeli style airport behavioral screening.
Edited on Thu Nov-18-10 07:30 PM by pnwmom
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-a...
Let's talk about a little known program being deployed across the nations' airports called SPOT, Screening Passengers by Observation Technique. According to an article in Nature News, by Sharon Weinberger, America's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has trained 3,000 officers to detect and infer future behavior, in what can only be described as a psychic effort, to determine an individual's intent. The TSA claims that these screeners are trained to observe and identify people who appear to be deceptive and planning hostile acts.
How, you ask?
In the 1970's psychologist Paul Ekman codeveloped the 'facial action coding system', for analyzing human facial expressions. He is now capitalizing on this theory by teaching people he calls "wizards" how to link those expressions to hidden emotions, including the intent to deceive. I would caution travelers against tensing your lips or raising your brow while waiting in an airport security line. You may end up in cuffs.
Although this has been a lucrative venture for Ekman and the media is eating up his superhero detection rhetoric, Weinberger reports that his colleagues are still waiting to see a comprehensive evaluation of his work. According to her findings, his work has never been subjected to controlled scientific tests. She goes on to cite instances where fellow scientists were unable to replicate Ekman's results on facial coding. In fact, recent studies have cast serious doubt on the scientific basis for Ekman's and the TSA's wishful thinking. The JASON Defense Advisory Group prepared a report in 2008 that stated, "No scientific evidence exists to support the detection or inference of future behavior, including intent." In addition, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, released a two- year review of the program stating that the TSA had no business deploying SPOT in airports across the nation "without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment."
It gets better. According to the GAO report,from late May 2004 through August 2008, Behavior Detection Officers (BDOs) referred 152,000 travelers to secondary inspection, which resulted in approximately 1,100 arrests. These arrests included offenses such as outstanding warrants, illegal alien status and possession of drugs, but none of them were for terrorism-related offenses or threats to aviation, which is what the SPOT program is designed to identify. As Jim Harper of the CATO Institute pointed out , the number of arrests represents less than 1 percent of those sent to secondary screening. The GAO noted its inability to determine if this is a better arrest rate than would occur under random screenings. In other words, these statistics are likely not greater than chance. On a separate note, the GAO report also determined that at least 16 individuals allegedly involved in terrorism plots have moved at least 23 different times through eight airports where the SPOT program has been implemented. SPOT failed to catch any of these individuals.
SNIP
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http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100526/full/465412a.htm...
In August 2009, Nicholas George, a 22-year-old student at Pomona College in Claremont, California, was going through a checkpoint at Philadelphia International Airport when he was pulled aside for questioning. As the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees searched his hand luggage, they chatted with him about innocuous subjects, such as whether he'd watched a recent game.
Inside George's bag, however, the screeners found flash cards with Arabic words — he was studying Arabic at Pomona — and a book they considered to be critical of US foreign policy. That led to more questioning, this time by a TSA supervisor, about George's views on the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Eventually, and seemingly without cause, he was handcuffed by Philadelphia police, detained for four hours, and questioned by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents before being released without charge.
George had been singled out by behaviour-detection officers: TSA screeners trained to pick out suspicious or anomalous behaviour in passengers. There are about 3,000 of these officers working at some 161 airports across the United States, all part of a four-year-old programme called Screening Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT), which is designed to identify people who could pose a threat to airline passengers.
SNIP
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9586726Gee, what a shock the ACLU would be against something that uses common sense and instead support something that is insane.
nadinbrzezinski Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Thu Nov-18-10 07:32 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. Alas this is SOP around the world
And it works...
I doubt that it is done everywhere else the fruit of kaboom guy was allowed on a plane over seas.
Violet_Crumble Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Thu Nov-18-10 07:53 PM
Response to Reply #13
15. So it's okay to discriminate against Arabs the way Israel does?
Because that's what happens at Israeli airports. There's no justification for racial profiling at all...
Yeah Israel is so crazy for keeping an eye on people who want them all dead.
I don't get it they want terrorists to have constitutional rights yet, they want ours taken from us.
pnwmom Donating Member (1000+ posts) Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Thu Nov-18-10 09:32 PM
Response to Reply #26
72. And you think it's acceptable for police on our streets to use racial profiling?
Wow.
Well I expect if the suspect in a crime fits a certain description, that the police would focus on people who fit that description. I know that's crazy talk to libs.
The ACLU is one of the reasons that a terrorist damn near walked today.
