This report will go nowhere for a couple of reasons:
1. The requesters were two Democrats, so the Republicans will ignore it.
2. There are no politicals to inject any administration views and policies.
3. Once again, the TSA simply blew off the GAO. The response letter is somewhere between laughable and arrogant. It starts on Page 12 of the report.
"Highlights" include (Sorry -- Can't cut & paste text from a JPEG):
1. They never said they got rid of the SPOTNik program. They simply made the SPOTNiks ordinary clerks, but with SPOTNik powers.
2. They said they used the money from the SPOTNik to buy more clerks for the long lines last year.
3. They cherry-picked the
RAND study (which had very little to do with airport security):
The TSA quoted:
...there is current value and unrealized potential for using behavioral indicators as part of a system to detect attacks.
Here's the ENTIRE text so you can read what they conveniently omitted (bolded for convenience):
Despite exaggerations found in commercial claims and the media, there is current value and unrealized potential for using behavioral indicators as part of a system to detect attacks. Unfortunately, analytic quantification of that potential is poorly developed.
In the same paragraph, the TSA pulled this sentence fragment out of context:
Observing physiological state holds promise for detecting deception and other behaviors.
Here's the entire paragraph (Surprise -- This section is mostly about polygraphs.):
Physiological State and Reactions.
Observing physiological state holds promise for detecting deception and other behaviors. We touch upon polygraph testing, other measures of peripheral nervous system response, electroencephalograms (EEGs), vocal stress, and facial expression analysis.
They wrote that you needed to be a SPOTNik in order to "detect"
"hanging wires, especially around the waist, may be signs or a suicide bomber."
And, of course, they justify the SPOTNik program on the Big Catch of somebody in McAllen, Texas, who, under intense SPOT interrogation, who was carrying 4.4 kilos of cocaine. Of course, they justify the War on Drugs because terrorists do the same things.
This is the same lack of accountability we see every day at checkpoints. They just lie and walk away.