.....Here's how it works: Select TSA employees will be trained to identify suspicious individuals who raise red flags by exhibiting unusual or anxious behavior, which can be as simple as changes in mannerisms, excessive sweating on a cool day....
god help us all as well as the poor slob who is gets to the airport late and has to run in order to not miss their flight but must now stand in the security line sweating and constantly looking at their watch-

Maybe this will finally get the Ma and Pa Kettles of the "anything for security" bandwagon.

And I can see this being abused for people who don't put up with the shoe carnival too.

I can just see this now:

TSA: Sir, please remove your shoes.
Pax: They're less than an inch, so they're not profile and they have no metal.
TSA: Sir, you're copping an attitude. Please step thru to secondary for a clearance interview and background check. It should only take about 30 minutes until you're cleared to fly. Have a nice flight, if you don't miss it.

Yes you are right the look is priceless.

As for catching the fake ID's, drug runners, they actually have something to do with security, but absolutelynothing to do with aviation security. Catching these folks belongs to the province of law enforcment.

As for the questions, when are they actually going to do the questioning. Is this when I step up to the WTMD. Hmmm. maybe I will play mute, or claim laringitus. Of course I just could claim my 5th Amendment, that should be fun. Or maybe a lawyer or two could set up shop at the airport, and for everyone who is pulled aside asks for a lawyer, they have to stop the questioning until he/she gets there.

This may be part of what the rumor I have heard about the possible end of the SSSS program. Resulting in complete randomness at the checkpoint with the watchlist acting as a buffer to catch the "bad people" at checkin.

Of course what I would like to do with this is to take Spot and leave a spot on their SPOT.

"This system is conducted by trained personnel and closely monitored by supervisors," he says. "It provides another significant layer of security."

Significant? Security?

How many more words will TSA feel the need to redefine?

Are these the same "trained personnel" and supervisors that are currently running the circus?

They performed a test of this during the holidays, by having a uniformed TSA person stand behind the ticket/ID checker. Based on observing the passengers in line, the TSA people pulled over 500 people of interest and asked them questions. They were then either sent on their way, sent to secondary, or sent to secondary and an LEO was called. About 30 out of the 500 were found to be up to "something (mostly drugs, but some people with "too much" money), though none were terrorists.

They're adamant that the program does not use race, and that using race as a factor harms its effectiveness.

When they insist upon such, I'd like to have them make available back-up evidence too. That's why I'd insist on camera footage and all of it being in the public domain.

I'd also like to find out the demographic details (and more) about the 30 that got "tagged" and about the 500 that were selected for questioning.

Given the TSA's high-profile celebratory nature when they actually catch something, the silence about this program up until now speaks volumes about its "effectiveness."

I have a few comments on the photo in the article.

1. Suspicious -- the "subject" had on a jacket in Phoenix. Must be up to something.

2. Her eyes -- she is enjoying the pat down waaaay to much. Ze must be up zu somezing [sic].

the big problem here is that you have incompetent people being told what to do....

If people (who are not idiots) were properly trained, it might be a decent program. It isn't. This is when people who won't stand to have their shoes removed become a "threat", and will be forced into a more intense search.

And in their fervent zealousness to ensure they don't look like they're using race and to show that using race would be harmful (even though they almost certainly have not done an objective study to determine if race would be a useful qualifier), they will almost certainly pull aside otherwise non-suspicious white people for questioning and decline to pull aside "suspicious" looking "middle-eastern" types.

Sounds to me mainly like this is another excuse for them to deny legitimate claims of mistreatment by innocent passengers as there's no way more than one in a thousand pax will actually be doing something suspicious enough to warrant such investigation. (And in those cases, I'd rather the TSA leave it to the pros and let the LEOs do their job.)

They won't "decline to pull aside 'suspicious' looking 'middle-eastern' types"; they'll pull such people over anyway and then hide what they are doing by bothering non-"middle eastern" types to make it seem like they are not doing racist profiling; and when called out on racist profiling, they'll use the non-"middle eastern" types to make the numbers look good and defend their inherently wrong actions.

I hear (though I haven't looked for it) that there was a big article about it in USA Today at some point.

The program has been very limited to date, so there aren't too many catches to publicize, I'd imagine.

Well, they are requiring TSA people to apply to be part of the program, so theoretically they'll only be taking the "best."

I understand that there is some scientific evidence to back up the effectiveness of these techniques, though I haven't looked for it. Since they're behavioral, race is not useful.

Is THAT what they were doing in DFW (and apparently still are) as I wrote about a few months back? I wondered what the TSA was doing "helping" with the ID checking. I must not have been suspicious looking because I wasn't pulled aside.

I did go through a "demo" of sorts of this last year when the MA State Troopers introduced the program that had been in use at BOS for a while. It was interesting but I didn't get a feeling for how effective it would be. The question of profiling came up and the Trooper skirted it very smoothly.

If all TSA can brag about is how many "regular" crooks they have been catching, I don't think this is a program suitable for TSA. They should be looking at transportation security and leave the rest to regular LEO. There is a very thin line around the "general consent" to screening and I'm afraid this can very well cross that line.

Agree with the second part but not the first.

In the months following 9/11 when random pullasides and gate checks were much more common (even without SSSS), there were all kinds of media reports from airport security workers of them being told from above not to avoid intentionally extra screening for arabs or "middle-eastern-lookng" types even if they were "suspicious," because it would give the appearance of racial profiling and generally look bad. There were also stories that some checkpoints were given "quotas" of the maximum number of arabs or "middle-eastern-looking" types they could pull aside over a given timeframe.

This was the same era when flight crews and elderly people were even more likely to be pulled aside because screeners would look like they were "fighting terrorism" but knew these groups were least likely to complain.

A problem with any racially-aware policy (law-enforcement, hiring, whatever) is that because of the sensitivity of the issue it becomes an excessive focus of the implementers, often to the detriment of the "non-protected" categories. I've often wondered how many times LEOs in districts accused of racial profiling conciously decide, "OK, it's time to pull over a white guy so my numbers look better," and then harass the next white guy that comes along for no reason other than his race.

"It's been very effective overseas."

Hmmm...

"That's all the questions I have. Gate 16, Mr. Reid. Have a pleasant flight. Please keep your carry-on luggage with you at all times. Nice shoes."