Screening Tactics at TSA

Uneasy Response

Computerized physiological readings chill researchers such as David Matsumoto of San Francisco State University, who's spent 25 years studying how people reveal emotion in split-second "microexpressions" that flash across their faces. "We're talking about feelings we don't want others to know in the first place," he says. Authorities "are becoming privy to information we're not consenting to give."

Hawley, who has emerged as the government's leading behavior-detection advocate, says automated detection "is in the far distant future." The TSA's present system, he says, "is phenomenally successful" -- even if more than 90 percent of questionable people turn out innocent.

At Dulles last week, Kinsey, the TSA behavior officer, approached a suspicious passenger going through security and guided the man to an open area for additional screening. Kinsey did a routine passport and boarding-pass check, searched the man's messenger-style bag and chatted him up while paying attention to what he said and how he said it.

The man had caught Kinsey's eye not just because he acted nervously, but because he acted differently. Other travelers shuffling blankly along the security line that quiet afternoon showed all the emotion of cattle. This passenger's contrasting anxiety showed, in TSA parlance, "deviations from baseline behavior." He merited a closer look, a face-to-face conversation where Kinsey could scrutinize his body, voice and speech to see if his score on a TSA checklist rose to a level requiring police attention.

"We're looking to see if there's any cognitive overload in responses to simple questions like, How are you today? Where are you headed?" says Carl Maccario, a TSA program analyst in Boston who helped launch the agency program at Logan International Airport in 2003. "If you're trying to be deceptive or up to some malfeasance, people can pick up cues the body will display when that conflict is going on."

But the ability of screeners to reliably detect deceit during conversations is questioned by Homeland Security researchers, who early this year launched a study of what security officials should look for to find dangerous people. "The research in this area is fairly immature," says Larry Willis, who manages the department's Project Hostile Intent. "We're trying to establish whether there is something to detect."

When Kinsey asked questions, the anxious look that the passenger wore in the security line melted into a smile as he explained how he got confused going through the unfamiliar Dulles terminal to make a connecting flight. Assured by the passenger's chatty comfort and by his own search, Kinsey wished him a good trip without taking down his name.

A Variety of Charges

The encounter underscored the rarity of problems that the TSA program has uncovered since January 2006 when it was expanded from a handful of airports.

In that time, 43,000 of the millions of travelers watched by crowd-scanning behavior-detection screeners have appeared suspicious enough to warrant a closer look, the TSA says. The closer looks generated 3,100 calls from the TSA to police for further questioning.

The police arrested 278 of those people, none on terror charges. Among the charges described in TSA news releases about behavior-related arrests are immigration violations and possessing guns and illegal prescription drugs.

At least one behavior-related stop has "developed meaningful information of interest to the intelligence community," Hawley says. And many people who were questioned by police but not arrested were found with problems that could indicate terrorist intent, such as having fake identifications or appearing to do surveillance. Such incidents are logged with a subject's name into a federal database.

"The vast majority of them are hiding something," Hawley says of travelers who raise the highest level of suspicion.

The program has won converts among skeptics such as security technologist Bruce Schneier. The frequent TSA critic says behavior detection may be "really powerful" because it tries to find terrorists instead of keeping them from carrying an ever-changing list of dangerous objects on airplanes. "If you focus on a tactic, the terrorists pick a different tactic. This focuses on the bad guy," Schneier says.

But critics who question behavior detection wonder if the TSA could net the same number of criminals by randomly pulling 43,000 travelers aside for extra screening and a few questions.