Just had a troubling experience at LGW -- looks like they are introducing "SPOT" type programmes. After having my passport and BP checked as usual by the gate agent, I walked through into the waiting area and was approached by a man in a (very nice) suit and asked for my passport. I asked him who he was and under what a authority he was asking for it and said he was a "special branch" police officer and displayed his ID. He took my passport and then started asking me questions about my travels, what I do for a living, etc. I asked what he wanted the information for and he replied he was "interested in people who are travelling". I told him his "interest" was not reason enough for me to provide private information. He flipped through my passport and then said, "it looks like you travel quite a bit". I acknowledged that that was a conclusion one could reasonably reach from examining my passport. He then thanked me and I went on.

Amazing how ideas travel from one bureaucracy to another, no matter how stupid and pointless they are.

Lovely. I would think at least the UK would respect their own publication - Nature journal (the most respected scientific journal in the World), which published this May that SPOT has no scientific basis.

In mitigation spotting done by experts (preferably Israeli trained .......) could provide an additional and reliable level of security. It is certainly far from stupid or pointless.

I understand why people may object - we're all different - but I'm for it and will cooperate with humour and helpfulness so long as the approach is courteous and completed by trained people and not BAA staff.

I find it reassuring.

Special Branch at Gatwick (who I am very well acquainted with) are not engaged in anything remotely similar to the SPOT program. Embarkation checks are routinely conducted on specifically targeted flights for various specific reasons related to criminal activity and have been so since time immemorial (long before SPOT was dreamed up). They are not on a fishing expedition by any means.

We live in a world in which many people believe in things that have no scientific basis. SPOT fits right in.

I was impressed with your signature line ....""Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." Mark Twain " and you will therefore sympathise I'm sure and be ope minded when I say that we also live in a world where people choose to ignore .....

Perhaps you should google "behavior pattern recognition " as well as "screening passengers by observation techniques" and look a little more at how Ben Gurion Airport .... possibly the potentially most dangerous target airport in the world and how they have reduced risks impressively before concluding on the issue.

Keep in mind that there are a lot of people who seem to think Lie to Me and 24 are documentaries.

How do you know they are 'experts' or 'trained' ? I don't know whether the UK has a similar requirement for a reasonable and articulable suspicion before a police officer, even special branch, can accost a citizen. Probably not, and there is always the infamous section 44 stop, but that legally does not require the subject to identify his/herself.

It certainly seems like a fishing expedition to me unless OP resembled a wanted individual, or has skin of a particular shade.

I would not find such an interrogation the least bit reassuring. Boiling frog syndrome.

+1. These police officers have been operating in this way in UK airports for years, long before the TSA existed or 9/11 happened. And I agree - they are generally focused on some specific objective rather than a fishing expedition.

Special Branch operations at Gatwick are almost always based upon specific intelligence. As I mentioned earlier, I've worked a lot with these folks over the years and they are the most professional police officers I've encountered anywhere in the world. They don't have the time or resources to go on fishing expeditions.

This is not a bunch of wannabe cops playing fortune teller at an airport carnival like the TSA SPOT program. This is the real deal. The fact that the OP's interaction appears to have been quite pleasant speaks volumes in comparison.

Oh, I have a relatively open mind, and also know a number of highly trained people in various professions within the mental health field. While some of them are capable of evaluating people, the process is far from one of casual observation in a crowd.

You really can't compare what SPOT does with anything else- the difference in the level of training and clinical experience being a major issue. A few days of training does not begin to give insight into the complex range of human motivation, even if the person receiving said training is very self aware. The incident in at Philadelphia International Airport should be a lesson in how this program fails to be effective, and in fact can lead to wrongly subjective conclusions that can damage the lives of innocent people. It would be better if they stuck with WEI, and forgot the domestic witch hunting, as in the above case.

The TSA's SPOT program is not comparable to what is done at TLV.Surely the interaction would have been even more pleasant (cough) had the officer explained this specific intelligence instead of giving some blow-off non-reason. I know they have to have their little secrets, but the result is just one more traveller being left with a less than favourable opinion of the police.

We're not stupid, tell us why you're in our faces.

I ran across one of these guys at Heathrow on July 8, 2005, the day after the London bombings. I was heading into the old T2 EU departures area and was eventually landing in Nice. There was one positioned behind each passport checker and they clearly were not stopping people randomly, rather based on physical characteristics. Being mid-20s and of Middle Eastern origin, its pretty clear what was on this guy's mind and I made it clear by the look I gave him that he was a racist idiot. He asked some questions and moved on.

"Well sir, our informant Bob who spies on this drug cartel for us, said that there was a guy heading out on this flight carrying ten kilos of cocaine shoved up his rectum. You wouldn't happen to know anything about things shoved up your rectum would you?"

Touche!