Originally Posted by
OldGoat
Why is criminal history a tangible risk criteria? To be a valid criteria, a positive correlation must exist between criminal history and attempts to take WEI onboard aircraft (note: this is a frequentist's argument). I doubt such a correlation can be demonstrated. The reports I've read are almost all focused on simple forgetfullness by people without a criminal history. Moreover, the attempts by those with criminal histories must be to small for a correlation to be proven.
Since the number of people who would attempt to take WEI onboard aircraft is very small, you can't find
any proven criteria. So you have to use common sense. If somebody has a criminal history of armed robbery, for example, you know that their morality is such that they're willing to harm others to obtain personal benefit. If you were a terrorist and wanted to pay somebody to bring WEI on an airplane, such a person would be an obvious choice. You don't need any studies to prove that.
And people who bring a weapon on a plane due to forgetfullness aren't a threat. I'm not saying that they should be
allowed to bring it, but if they're given a lighter screening that doesn't detect it, no harm has been done. So we needn't try to find anything that correlates with such forgetfullness.
I think everybody here agrees that a path that searches just for objects isn't viable. And few here are in favor of any plan that exempts a group of people from security. It seems clear that the only workable approach is one that tries to assign a "risk" score to individuals and act accordingly. It sounds like that's being proposed. Whether the TSA can pull it off or not is a big question and I, like most here, and skeptical.
But I also think that any such plan depends on using
many criteria, not just one or two. Some of those should be positive and some negative. The more known about a person and the more investigations that have been done the lower the risk. So security clearances, CCP permits, NEXUS status, flight rate, FF program status, and long credit histories seem to me to be legitimate positives. Criminal history is certainly a legitimate negative one, but I can't think of another at the moment.
What I think may well doom such a program is that most of the above can only be checked in opt-in situation. And that will likely produce a situation where the infrequent flyer always gets a "higher risk" score. That's going to cause both PR issues and logistical problems at the checkpoint. In my opinion, the challenge of such a program will be avoiding assigning such a score to those people.