Undercover Government Accountability Office investigators in recent years have gotten past Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners with components to make unconventional explosives at airports that do not have the technology to detect such materials. Meanwhile, highly motivated, well-resourced terrorists continue to experiment with novel new ways to destroy passenger planes.

Taking all that into consideration, TSA and counterterror officials believe it makes perfect sense to continue to use – and expand - TSA's airport behavior detection program, which statistics indicate works, regardless of whether it has yet to disrupt a terrorist plot to blow up aircraft.

In the United States since January 2006, there have been more than 1,575 arrests resulting from TSA’s Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) referrals, TSA told HToday.us.

“These passengers met a threshold and our highly trained Behavior Detection Officers [BDOs] referred them for either additional screening or to law enforcement,” TSA spokesman Greg Soule told HSToday.us Wednesday.

But security expert Bruce Schneier has questioned whether the “social costs, including loss of liberty, restriction of fundamental freedoms, and the creation of a thoughtcrime,” is worth the effort, adding, “Is this the sort of power we want to give a police force in a constitutional democracy, or does it feel more like a police-state sort of thing?”

Homeland Security Today reported in the May 2008 feature, “Keep Your Shoes On and Tell the Truth,” that Israel’s decades-old behavior detection program - specifically at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv – that focuses on people and not things has been phenomenally successful. But, then, the Israeli’s pioneered this sort of airport security.

Meanwhile, though, despite intelligence that terrorists continue to be interested in penetrating aviation security measures to take down passenger planes, some US legislators, members of the Obama administration, and civil rights proponents would like to weaken, if not outright cripple, TSA’s SPOT and other behavior detection-based initiatives.

For one thing, critics argue that it’s an intrusion of civil rights and that the expense of running the SPOT program, given the non-terrorists it so far has caught, isn’t worth it. Counterterror officials in turn argue that if SPOT is responsible for catching just one terrorist who might otherwise have killed hundreds, then it is worth it.

Former CIA officer and Georgia Republican Rep. Bob Barr renewed ruckus over TSA’s behavior detection efforts in an op-ed earlier this week. Barr wrote “two years ago … I wrote that [TSA] was deploying ‘Behavior Detection Officers” (BDOs) at America’s airports to watch for “suspicious’ behavior exhibited by people at those facilities. The program purported to teach undercover TSA employees to scan people at airports – not just passengers waiting to pass through security, but everyone – for tell-tale signs of nervousness, which could then lead to their being interrogated and possibly arrested.”

“I complained at the time of this significant expansion of TSA’s jurisdiction (the ‘mission creep’ that seems to bedevil virtually every government agency), and reminded readers of the evils of attempting to ‘profile’ people based on behavior characteristics,” Barr stated.

Continuing, Barr said “earlier this year, I wrote again about TSA’s fixation with technology, as evidenced by its plan to greatly expand the number of full-body x-ray machines at airports. Well, those loveable folks at TSA (and their bosses at the parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security) have taken yet another step in their relentless drive to bring ‘1984’ front and center to America’s airports. Eager always to take advantage of the willingness of passengers to surrender all sense of privacy if made to feel safe, DHS is spending millions of our tax dollars to develop technology that would remotely monitor certain bodily functions and alert TSA employees whenever someone is exuding signs of nervousness.”

Barr was referring to potential behavior detection-related technologies that are being studied at DHS’s science and technology directorate that could detect suspicious behavior. It’s known as the Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST, program. Similar initiatives are underway in Israel.

Yet despite all the fear mongering that has erupted over reporting about the FAST initiative, FAST technology is not currently under consideration by TSA at this time, HSToday.us learned.

Meanwhile, SPOT trained BDOs continue to be trained and deployed to many more airports – a decision Israeli airport security authorities have applauded given the demonstrated value of suspicious behavior efforts in Israel and now in the United States.

As for the deployment of whole-body scanners that can detect materials concealed underneath a person’s clothing, counterterror authorities say increased use of the technology “is absolutely justified,” as one said, in light of Islamist jihadists’ efforts to develop new and novel ways to carry explosives materials past TSA security and onto a plane. See the recent HSToday.us report, “The Threat of Body Bombs and Surgical Implants.”

The people-focused security at Ben Gurion involves singling suspicious people out of airport crowds based on specific facial expressions, body language, behavior, speech—even attire—and then asking them questions. It’s all been methodically designed to identify suspicious conduct that even TSA acknowledges can be related to surveillance or pre-attack behavior traits.

They are questions specially designed to identify “anything out of the ordinary, anything that does not fit,” a Ben Gurion undercover screener told HSToday.us during a briefing of the behavior detection program at the airport.

All of Ben Gurion’s security personnel, overt and covert, are trained in “security profiling,” or behavior pattern recognition, said Nahun Liss, head of the Planning, Control and Projects Department of the Ben Gurion Security Division.

Raphael “Rafi” Ron, Ben Gurion’s security director for five years, has said Israel’s advantage is that it long ago came to terms with the human component of terrorism. In other words, terrorism is carried out by people. He has said that Ben Gurion’s security has clearly demonstrated that miscreants can be found and stopped by an effectively robust security methodology that is focused on … people!

Similarly, in responding to complaints by civil libertarians in the United States that TSA’s SPOT program is prima facie racial profiling, former TSA Secretary Kip Hawley strongly disagreed, noting, “If you rely on what you think a terrorist looks like, you’re going to miss them … terrorists are very smart …”

Asked about Hawley’s remark, Liss shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “No duh,” and said, “That’s exactly right.”

Using a common sense approach, Ron said, “We assumed that before an attack could take place, there had to be a person with the intention of carrying out an attack and second, there had to be a weapon. But on Sept. 11, we learned that a weapon is not necessary. What remains is the human factor. Without a person who intends to do harm, an attack will not take place.”

Consequently, Ron said TSA’s obsession with “things” is “unintelligent … everybody understands—including the passengers—that the relevance of your nail file to the security of the flight is nil. It doesn’t exist. … By wasting your time and attention on [such things] … you are simply not aiming in the right direction.”

Liss echoed Ron. “Your TSA focuses on things and not people, and we have found that’s not a very effective approach to identifying and isolating terrorists.”

TSA’s SPOT program pretty much is based on the same principles of questioning that Israeli airport security behavior detection officers are trained to conduct to detect lying, deception, etc. which might require additional questioning and/or screening of the person and his or her baggage, which never leaves the person until Israeli security officials have cleared the person to be allowed on the plane.

Just like in Israel, in the United States authorities say the focus has begun to shift away from analyzing the content of carry-on luggage to analyzing passengers' intentions, emotions, demeanor, etc.

Nevertheless, Barr wrote that “people should not be subject to having their eye movements, their skin temperature, their heartbeat, their perspiration, their breathing patterns, or any other bodily functions remotely scanned and analyzed by some government employee,” like the FAST initiative now being studied would do.

But the suitability of such technology as a future component of airport security is not now officially under consideration by TSA.

“But there could be a call for it should some terrorist plot involving, say, multiple planes, successfully be pulled off killing hundreds that all the existing security measures – including the use of BDOs – didn’t detect,” said a veteran government counterterror official.