American Civil Liberties Union

Let's talk about a little known program being deployed across the nations' airports called SPOT, Screening Passengers by Observation Technique. According to an article in Nature News, by Sharon Weinberger, America's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has trained 3,000 officers to detect and infer future behavior, in what can only be described as a psychic effort, to determine an individual's intent. The TSA claims that these screeners are trained to observe and identify people who appear to be deceptive and planning hostile acts.

In a post about body scanners last month, I noted that the health effects of these machines has been a "muted part of the debate." The issue just got less muted. NPR is reporting that a group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, has raised concerns over the health effects of backscatter X-ray body scanners, which is one of the two types being deployed (the other being millimeter wave). The scientists' concerns over backscatter are disputed by the TSA and others, and we at the ACLU do not pretend to be scientists. But, the scientists' brief letter (PDF), which they sent on April 6 to President Obama's science advisor John P. Holdren, is worth looking at.