I recently ran across an article talking about new “behavioral targetting” techniques being tried out by the TSA at different airports across the country and figured mutineers would be quite interested in the story.

A moment of truth for many a brown man…

On the one hand, these techniques are interesting / important because they address a key criticism of US airport security measures — rather than “finding the weapon,” security experts (particularly the Israeli’s) assert that we should instead be focusing security systems on “finding the terrorists.” On the other hand, such a focus on the people involved creates troubling new questions about the hassles of “Flying While Brown” post 9/11.

This is a pretty meaty discussion so I’ve decided to break this up into 2 parts… In this part, let’s take a look at what behavioral targetting entails and some discussion of the Israeli experience with it… in a later post, I’ll go into some of the statistics on how to “prove” Flying While Brown.

First, how does it work? –

Travelers at Sea-Tac and dozens of other major airports across America are being scrutinized by teams of TSA behavior-detection officers specially trained to discern the subtlest suspicious behaviors.

…the central task is to recognize microfacial expressions — a flash of feelings that in a fraction of a second reflects emotions such as fear, anger, surprise or contempt, said Carl Maccario, who helped start the program for TSA.

“In the SPOT program, we have a conversation with (passengers) and we ask them about their trip,” said Maccario from his office in Boston. “When someone lies or tries to be deceptive, … there are behavior cues that show it. … A brief flash of fear.”

Such people are referred for secondary screening, which can include a pat-down search and an X-ray exam. The microfacial expressions, he said, are the same across many cultures.

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p>Israeli airport security is predicated on this system and doesn’t ask you to remove shoes at the checkpoint; instead, your travel profile is built up based on observation and Q&A. A great case study of these techniques can be found in the difference in the way the Israeli’s handled Richard Reid –

Too Many Micro-Expressions…

[Israeli Sky Marshal] Dror asks how Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was ever allowed on that American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami.

“The first thing: Where is your suitcase? You are not going to the United States without any suitcase,” says Dror. “How, where are you going to spend your time? Are you, are you going to sleep naked in the Central Park? What are you going to do over there without suitcase? So, this is the first question and that (will) raise a lot of red lights.”

In fact, the Israelis got a chance to ask Reid a lot of questions, because he flew El Al last summer. They didn’t like the look of him, so they checked everything in his bags, and everything he was wearing, and then put an armed sky marshal in the seat right next to him.

Dror adds, “I can tell you more than that, I am sure that even the time that he spent here in Israel, we know exactly when he went, where he (had) been, who he meet with.”

The GoodNews / BadNews is that, in the Israeli case, the system works. At least when it comes to providing airline security… Does it cause other problems? Well, lots of folks assert various forms of blowback and swap cause & effect…

In the US, the risk that Behavioral Targetting will devolve into Ethnic Profiling is well recognized –

“The problem is behavioral characteristics will be found where you look for them,” the American Civil Liberties of Massachusetts legal director John Reinstein told The Washington Post.

But Naseem Tuffaha, political chairman of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s Seattle chapter, looks at the program as a potential step away from racial profiling.

“Our message in working with federal and local authorities has been to make behavioral-based decisions rather than ethnic-profiling decisions. Our message is to really focus on suspicious behavior rather than suspicious-looking people,” he said.

But Tuffaha warned that if the TSA “only looked hard when somebody is Middle Eastern-appearing … then you are still conducting racial profiling under a different name.”

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p>And in fact this is a problem in Israel –

THERE IS no arguing that security officials scrutinize Arabs, including Israeli Arabs, much more carefully than they do Jews. Less risky than Arabs but riskier than Jews, in the eyes of security, are non-Arab gentile passengers. An airport official admitted as much to me off-the-record, while “Jackie,” a former airport security examiner, states plainly that this is the policy.

“Ultimately, it’s a question of [ascertaining a passenger’s] loyalty to Israel,” says Jackie, who worked at Atarot, Ben-Gurion and Eilat airports as well as Israeli airline terminals abroad for a few years during the last decade. “A Jew would only be coming here because he loves Israel, and he wouldn’t commit a terrorist act. You can’t make that same assumption about Israeli Arabs or non-Jews.”

He adds, however, that according to policy, an Israeli Arab who’s served in the IDF is considered no higher a security risk than a Jew. Furthermore, he says, the level of suspicion – and thus the rigor of the airport examination – varies according to the individual Arab or gentile, with the greatest suspicion falling on males between their late teens and mid-30s who are traveling alone.

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p>So a certain level of singling out by ethnicity is at least implicit in the system (as well as by age and sex – but folks don’t seem to get worked up over those 2 as much). Both the defense and the prosecution arguments on this issue boil down to the inherent statistical uncertainties involved –

[An] undeniable fact is that a hijacker or bomber of an Israeli or Israeli-bound airplane is extremely likely to be an Arab or Muslim, while the chance of his being a Jew is infinitesimal. So as long as human judgment is required in airport security, at least some measure of ethnic profiling is probably going to be unavoidable.

But there is still one more undeniable fact: All those countless Arabs and gentiles who get the third degree from Israeli airport security examiners are at least 99.9999% guaranteed not to be hijackers or bombers.

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p>For Browns in the US, the problem becomes that rather than the relatively binary question of “the metal detector beeped”, the criteria for being pulled aside now becomes a softer “you flashed a micro-expression when I asked if you had any fruits or veggie’s in your bag.”

In a second post, I’ll get into more detail on the stats & my (admittedly inconclusive) thoughts on the issue.. For now, back to work