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Wipe That Look Off Your FaceEver get that feeling that someone's watching you? If you're at the airport this holiday season, that might not be your spidey sense tingling—someone really might be watching you. Specifically, the "behavior detection officers" of the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) Screening Passengers by Observational Techniques (SPOT) team. According to AlterNet's Liliana Segura, these specially trained TSA employees are trained to "weed out potential hijackers among us, by covertly examining travelers' facial expressions and body language as they go through security." The $3.1 million program is deployed at 161 airports, and has more than 3,000 SPOT-ters. Segura reports that in 2008, "98,805 passengers [were pulled] aside for additional screenings, out of which 9,854 were questioned by local police. 813 were eventually arrested." So you might be thinking: "813 arrests. That's good." But what about those 98,000 people who were pulled aside and subjected to extra questioning? Sounds like a needle in the haystack scenario to us. If the police stopped 98,000 people on the streets of Omaha or anywhere else, they might also make 813 arrests. But the police can’t do that of course, because Americans are protected by the Fourth Amendment, which normally bars the authorities from doing searches without probable cause. The government has a limited exemption to perform “administrative searches” at airports only for the specific purpose of protecting the safety of aviation. But airports are not supposed to be general law enforcement checkpoints. The other question to ask is: so how many of those 813 arrests had anything to do with threats to aviation? That’s the measure of the program’s success, not the number of raw arrests. When presented with the chance to tout their successes in the Washington Post recently, officials apparently couldn’t cite anything other than some arrests for drugs and fake IDs. As our own Jay Stanley told Segura: The problem with the SPOT program is that it is based on trying to stop terrorism by searching for supposed 'signs of terrorism' that are so commonplace that it results in an increase in the monitoring of individuals to no good end. Also, you can't dismiss this very salient fact: who isn't a bit uneasy at the airport? Between the virtual strip-search machines, bagging your liquids and taking off your shoes, "people have a million reasons to be nervous or anxious. In fact, if you're in today's airports and you're not a little crazed there's almost something wrong with you," Jay says. So, our tips for traveling over the holidays: Don't fidget. Don't look down. Don't pat your chest. Don’t stand out. Fit in. Oh, and don't be Indian. Or Muslim. Just don't be brown. Got that?
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13 Responses to "Wipe That Look Off Your Face" |
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Nov 24th, 2009 at 6:15pm
This statement: "So, our tips for traveling over the holidays: Don't fidget. Don't look down. Don't pat your chest. Don’t stand out. Fit in. Oh, and don't be Indian. Or Muslim. Just don't be brown." is why you make people crazy. We are trying these Gitmo cases in New York City whose to say there won't be a problem flying this Holiday Season.
Nov 24th, 2009 at 9:23pm
Highly accurate too - 1% positives
Nov 24th, 2009 at 9:23pm
Highly accurate too - 1% positives
Nov 24th, 2009 at 11:27pm
Nowhere in this article is there information to justify the conclusion that Indians or Muslims are being unfairly singled out. In order to conclude that, you would need to know how many Indians/Muslims pass through the screening as well as how many were pulled aside for questioning. The bigger question is whether this strategy is effective in preventing terrorism on airplanes, and if not, what would be effective; also, how much should the burden of transportation security be carried by the government vs. the businesses operating the transportation? Logically, buses and trains could also be terrorist targets, yet their security is handled much differently.
Nov 25th, 2009 at 9:14am
Instead of focusing on those poor, inconvenienced 97,992, you should focus your appreciation on the fact that 813 WERE APPREHENDED--read that as they were people who were potentially terrorists, or hi-jackers, or murderers, or anything else that warranted an arrest.
Keep in mind that it only took 19 terrorists to follow through with 9/11, so this "needle in a haystack" method stopped almost 43 times as many people from getting on planes. I'm willing to be 'inconvenienced' by additional questioning to stop 42.7 more 9/11s from happening, and I think you people at the ACLU need to pull your collective head out and realize the big picture.
Quit fighting these little whiny, spoiled-brat type battles. It's a waste of human energy, time, money, and bandwidth.
Keep in mind, people...no one says you have to fly anywhere. I drove from California to Virginia in July in a car with vinyl seats and no A/C--point being that flight is a luxury, not a necessity. You want to fly, you have to go through the necessary steps to get on that plane. If you don't want to go through said steps, keep your happy ass at home or drive. Either way, quit complaining.
Nov 26th, 2009 at 2:19pm
Why stop at nervous people in airports.
Why not roust gun owners to see if they are going to rob a bank or people who go to fundementalist churchs to see if they want to fire bomb an abortion clinic?
Nov 27th, 2009 at 7:58am
I am of Indian descent and am Christian. I have had some terrible/weird experiences at the airport because of my skin color/ethnicity and the only reason for it is racial profiling.
Nov 27th, 2009 at 10:04am
As a financial supporter of the ACLU it would be nice to see this blog post try to use cogent, reasoned and balanced arguments to make its points rather than one-off examples and using distorted statistics. Sure 98,000 people were pulled aside, but that was out of 57.4 million passengers, or one-tenth of one percent of all passengers. For three million dollars, and the small number of passengers inconvenienced, it's a non-issue. As to racial profiling, the folks these days who want "death to the USA", and those involved in the horrific events of 9/11 do seem to fit a certain profile, no?
Nov 27th, 2009 at 12:47pm
Racial profiling almost always goes hand in hand with so called "behavioral profiling". Why? For all the reasons that have been found in behavioral research; people have ingrained prejudices and biases that are extremely difficult to root out and can create perceptions that aren't based in any sort of objective reality.
The presumption too is that the only people wanting to use the transportation system for terrorism, of course, are individuals with a specific racial profile. Any number of radical groups have used hijackings and bombings to get their point across, and no one will ever know what FUTURE radical groups will look like or come from. I remember all the dingbats after the Oklahoma bombing that assured us it was the work of Muslim terrorists when it turned out to be a white, far right extremist.
Nov 27th, 2009 at 8:55pm
Brian,
Flying is no longer a luxury when you realize that it costs *less than half* as much to fly from coast-to-coast as to drive. That makes *driving* a luxury today, in terms of both time and money. Our "war on terror" drove up the price of gas further, ensuring that this dynamic would fixate, and it has.
Given that flying is a now a *commodity* and NOT a *luxury*, the necessary activity represents a wide cross-section of our population, and the rights of those doing it thereby need to be protected. More obviously, given that our government has used scare tactics and war to create a commodity where there was none before, curiously in exactly the place they already had legal loopholes to strip-search everyone, our CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS against unreasonable search and seizure need to be protected! That isn't *whiney* -- it's one of our country's founding principles to ensure liberty!
Further, as the article mentioned, the 815 people arrested weren't arrested because of "terrorism"... they were arrested for minor crap like drugs and fake IDs. No amount of drugs or fake IDs are going to threaten the safety of your flight. If I had to guess (which I do because the article makes no mention), I'd guess that a sizable percentage of the remaining people who were arrested for something other than drugs or fake IDs had local police warrants that were found during the "additional screening", and those are often for other potentially serious, but still non-flight-threatening behavior: not paying child support, outstanding traffic violations, DUIs, violation of restraining orders, hit-and-run auto accidents, etc. Murderers and actual "terrorists" found this way? It just isn't likely.
But as long as you're so concerned about the "threat level orange" you hear over the loud speakers, just keep in mind that there are no such screening procedures for entering shopping malls -- ITS ILLEGAL FOR OUR GOVERNMENT TO DO THAT -- airports are just a special exception.
Nov 28th, 2009 at 6:11pm
These programs are a joke. I have contact dermatitis which has resulted in a raised red rash on my right hand which comes and goes. I recently listened to local news station telling people to report anyone who has red burn marks on there hands to local police because they might be manufacturing bombs. I wonder how many of these paranoid idiots have mistaken an allergic rash for a burn and have reported me as a terrorist suspect for having allergies. When does the stupidity end?
Nov 30th, 2009 at 12:12pm
Brian,
I am curious why you even support the ACLU if that is your attitude. This isn't meant to be an obnoxious rhetorical question; I am seriously wondering why, if you are so unconcerned with the 4th Amendment, you are interested at all in the ACLU. Is there another part of the Constitution you are more sympathetic to?
Dec 6th, 2009 at 6:19pm
To the race card fanatics; I'm blond and have very pale skin- I've been harassed every single time I go to the airport so the whole skin color isn't true- the airport crap effects everyone. This simply isn't right, I dont need anyone looking through my suitcase and dumping out my panties and tampons in front of everyone to find a coke can. If there is some terrorist problem they should just bar the cockpit shut with bullet proof doors and have a guard for the passengers in every plane-it would be cheaper than the current plan and less invasive. Brian doesn't care about the fourth amendment so I say he is the first to experience the thoroughness of the new anal cavity bomb search before boarding his flight. I will personally cheer him on too.