Spidey senses -- out for repairs

Remember the Transportation Security Administration's highly touted effort to train its crack staff of hourly employees in "behavior detection," the better to protect us all from suspicious characters?

Ever get the feeling you’re being watched? Usually it’s just nerves or a good dose of electromagnetic energy, but if you’re traveling through a TSA checkpoint, chances are there are several sets of eyes on you. What are they looking at? Is your hair messed up? Looking flustered after problems at the ticket counter? Have toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe? No. You’re being watched by Behavior Detection Officers, or BDOs in government acronym-speak.

The program was designed by Paul Ekman (PhD), a psychology professor at the University of California Medical School, San Francisco. He’s been studying behavioral analysis for the past 40 years and has taught the TSA, Customs and Border Protection, CIA, FBI and other federal agencies to watch for suspicious facial expressions of tension, fear or deception. He has even taught animators at Disney-Pixar to create convincing faces for film characters. After passing along his skills to US Customs, their “hit rate” for finding drugs during passenger searches rose to 22.5 percent from 4.2 percent in 1998.

Behavior analysis is based on the fear of being discovered. People who are trying to get away with something display signs of stress through involuntary physical and physiological behaviors. Whether someone’s trying to sneak through that excellent stone ground mustard they bought on vacation, a knife, or a bomb, behavior detection officers like me are trained to spot certain suspicious behaviors out of the crowd. Once we make our determination, we refer these passengers for additional screening or directly to law enforcement.

So, how's that working out?

Fewer than 1% of airline passengers singled out at airports for suspicious behavior are arrested, Transportation Security Administration figures show, raising complaints that too many innocent people are stopped. ...

"That's an awful lot of people being pulled aside and inconvenienced," said Carnegie Mellon scientist Stephen Fienberg, who studied the TSA program and other counterterrorism efforts. "I think it's a sham. We have no evidence it works."

Ooooh. Not so good. Maybe, a fancied-up version of "I don't like his looks" isn't really the way to go in improving the effectiveness of law enforcement.