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An account from inside the system:

"I [have a relative] who is in fact one of the Behavior Detection Officers your item today mentions. She is a very nice, petite Asian woman, and she finds it pretty entertaining that she is now a BDO and gets to flag people for extra security, question them, etc.

"Some of her comments to us about her job raise some questions (for me at least, I don't think she thinks this critically about her job) about how these officers are regulated, and their approach to screening.
"One of her comments during a recent visit: "You know, those Arabs come through in groups of two or three, thinking they won't make us suspicious. But we know what they're up to...they're trying to get away with something. I'm not allowed to flag them or question them just because they look suspicious, though, they have to meet the checklist. And you know they know what the checklist is, and they're practicing their behavior so they can beat it." The checklist she's referring to is a list of "suspicious" behaviors (I gather there are like 15-20 on the list) and a person has to meet a certain threshold (# of suspicious behaviors) in order to be pulled for extra security or questioning. While I do approve of the general strategy here (assessment-driven, data-based, theoretically unbiased) it does leave me with some questions about whether someone could practice behaving in a non-suspicious way, thereby rendering these BDOs' jobs fairly useless.

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"One other interesting tidbit is that she was selected for the BDO program as an existing TSA agent--she has no college degree, psychology courses, or other special training beyond the fairly short course the TSA offered to her in order to become certified as a BDO (and it really is a *certification*--she has her BDO certificate with seal and all hanging in her home office). I really do wonder how effective this training, and their observations, can be.

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"One of her comments during a recent visit: "You know, those Arabs come through in groups of two or three, thinking they won't make us suspicious. But we know what they're up to...they're trying to get away with something. I'm not allowed to flag them or question them just because they look suspicious, though, they have to meet the checklist. And you know they know what the checklist is, and they're practicing their behavior so they can beat it."

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