I spy with my little eye: TSA rolling out new ‘behavior detection officers’

NEW YORK - NOVEMBER 24: A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer (in blue) watches over a line of people awaiting security screening November 24, 2010 at LaGuardia airport in the Queens Borough of New York City. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

But TSA has been criticized for trying validate its program after the fact. In a two-year review of the program released in 2010, the Government Accountability Office knocked TSA for deploying SPOT “without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment.”

The GAO found SPOT was more effective than random screening at catching individuals with fraudulent documents, but noted that additional work is needed to fully validate the program. The Department of Homeland Security’s own internal study was not designed to validate whether behavior detection can be used to reliably identify security risks.

The SPOT program is based partially on the work of psychologist Paul Ekman, a pioneer in the field of behavioral analysis. Elkman’s specific expertise centers on identifying minute facial cues — so-called “micro-expressions” — that indicate a person may be lying. In addition to consulting with the TSA, Ekman has worked with the CIA, FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

Other psychologists, however, have been critical of Ekman’s work. A 2007 study conducted by a committee of credibility-assessment experts concluded: “Simply put, people (including professional lie-catchers with extensive experience of assessing veracity) would achieve similar hit rates if they flipped a coin.”

Nevertheless, Ekman has taught about 1,000 TSA screeners and continues to consult on the program.

The methodology used in SPOT has never been subjected to controlled scientific tests. Part of the problem is that Ekman and the TSA haven’t disclosed the specific cues used to identify potential threats, citing security reasons. In fact, Ekman has largely stopped publishing, saying he doesn’t want to provide any help to terrorists trying to game the system.

The SPOT program has drawn comparisons with, and is indeed modeled on, Israeli airport security. Israel has the strictest airport security procedures in the world, involving intense screening and passenger interrogation.  But there is a massive difference in scale between the transportation systems of Israel and the United States.

Israel’s only major international airport, Ben Gurion International, handled 12 million passengers in 2010. By comparison, U.S. airports handled about 619 million airline passengers in 2010 — more than 66 million at Chicago’s O’Hare International alone.

In any case, SPOT is only growing. For fiscal year 2011, the Obama administration requested $232 million for the program.