After seeing no coverage of this hearing at all, I watched the entire two hours on the C-SPAN web site. The committee press release is here. C-SPAN's archive video is here.

It's well worth the investment in time, IMHO.

Rep. Paul Broun, an M.D., ran a calm hearing with insightful questions from most of the representatives. The only grandstanding came when Rep. Mica dropped in briefly. The panel included not only the psychology professor who came up with the techniques behind SPOT (and is the "expert consultant" to the TV show Lie To Me), but also another professor who called the techniques unproven, an ex-state trooper who has taught behavior recognition to law enforcement and calls SPOT a misapplication of the techniques, the GAO auditor of the SPOT program, and a DHS research manager who was involved in investigations leading to the program's implementation.

Needless to say, there was a lot of disagreement about the effectiveness of SPOT. The difference between this and other hearings, though, was that the panelists came armed with facts.

Some highlights:

At 0:38 - [police BD expert] the rate of terrorist passenger boardings in the USA is 1 in 173 million.

At 0:59 - [DHS research manager] in a baseline study of thousands of passenger-TSO interactions, SPOT techniques were several times as effective as random "referrals," but for every SPOT success (mostly all prohibited items) there were 86 false positives.

[DHS research manager] video exists of suspects arrested for terrorism offences traveling through airports, but the DHS research group has been unable to obtain any. This would let them determine if real terrorists actually give any of the facial clues used by SPOT to identify risky passengers.

At 1:19 - [independent psychology researcher] the TSA advisory committee on SPOT was never asked to look into scientific validation of the program.

[GAO auditor] to his knowledge, no cost-benefit evaluation of SPOT has ever been done.

Both the GAO auditor and the DHS research manager were frustrated by the lack of responsiveness from TSA about SPOT. The DHS guy sensibly said operational policies were not in his job description, but also phrased his answers about scientific studies very carefully.

Panelists repeatedly discussed the reason that SPOT makes so much noise about detecting criminal behavior. It's simply that enough criminal activity (mostly items prohibited from carrying onto airplanes) is seen to make reliable measurements, while terrorism-related incidents (suspicious passengers) are exceedingly rare. Or in FT terms, TSA can brag about detecting ordinary criminals because they've actually caught some.

Dr. Ekman, inventor of some BD techniques, has his testimony discussed in this FT topic. Written testimony of Larry Willis, the DHS research manager, is here.

With apologies for the long posting, I think it is this accumulation of damning detail that will make the most difference in bringing TSA under control, since purely political opposition is, unfortunately, not mainstream enough.