Airport security has a new name

Finally after four and half years of its creation the TSA has finally come up with a comprehensive program for detecting terrorist activities at airports. The program is called SPOT - Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques -a race-neutral profiling program designed to deter terrorist activities. The program will be tested out at JFK, LAX and O'Hare after sucessfully been tested at Logan Airport for the last three years. It has led to the arrest of 50 or so people guilty of having fake ID's, illegal documents and drug possession.

SPOT employees will be trained to observe human behavior for incongruities. Those identified as suspicious will be further examined and interviewed by local police and/or other officials.

I seem to recall an article I read a few years ago about the effectiveness of TSA when it was first created. Passengers were not allowed to carry lighters, scissors, and other instruments. But we had managed somehow to leave out the human element at the security checkpoints. As far as I am concerned, the human aspect is a critical aspect of intelligence gathering, and it ranks high within the CIA and the FBI. So we seemed to have left it out when the Department of Homeland Security created the Transportation Security Administration. The article said we needed to learn from Ben Gurion, Israel's international airport and the safest in the world, on how their security officers are efficiently trained to spot abnormal human behavior for the purposes of terrorists attacks and how they have managed to run an efficient and secure airport.

Finally we are learning something.