TSA: Behavior Detection Is "Just One Layer" (Of Job-Justifying Bullshit)
Reason's Airport Policy News dude, Bob Poole, sends me his newsletter.
In this edition, there was this bit about the Government Accountability Office report on the TSA's Office Of Well-Funded Bullshit...uh, formally known as the Office of Behavior Detection.
These are, well, they're not officers...they're workers...workers, as Bob puts it, who are...
...trained to spot suspicious behaviors of air travelers in airport terminals. The general thrust of the critiques was that there was no serious research demonstrating that minimally trained officers using a memorized list of 96 suspicious factors could add significant value by detecting threats to aviation.TSA's only reported evidence was data on referrals by BDOs to law enforcement. But the Government Accountability Office and others pointed out that essentially none of those referrals were for threats to aviation security: they were mostly things like being in the country illegally or being in possession of illegal drugs.
Bob notes the title of the new GAO report, GAO-17-608R, is titled "TSA Does Not Have Valid Evidence Supporting Most of the Revised Behavioral Indicators Used in its Behavior Detection Activities."
He adds:
I could stop there, but you should see what a flimsy basis TSA used to justify this ongoing program.First, here is a breakdown of the sources TSA provided. Of the 178 documents: 137 are news or opinion pieces, not studies; 21 are reviews of studies, which themselves cannot be verified. That left only 20 that are original research, which GAO had two social scientists evaluate for (1) reliability and validity of data and methods, and (2) the applicability of the research to the behavior indicators TSA now uses, which it claims the studies support.
The 20 studies themselves did not support 28 of the 36 currently used behavioral indicators. There was one source (out of the 20 studies) for each of 7 indicators, and two sources of evidence to support 1 indicator. Thus, there was a bit of support for 8 of the 36 indicators, and based only on some of the 20 actual studies, out of the 178 sources TSA cited.
How did TSA respond to the GAO report? Via its usual defenses: behavior detection is "just one layer of security" and besides, some of the BDO referrals to law enforcement lead to arrests (but not for being threats to aviation security). For this, general taxpayers and air travelers remain on the hook for $186 million per year.
After all this, you might expect GAO to recommend that the BDO program be terminated--and if checkpoints are still short of screeners (as they were last year), at least some of the 2,393 current BDOs could be re-assigned to screening duty.
But GAO this time made no recommendations, merely reminding Rep. Thompson that "TSA should continue to limit funding for the agency's behavior detection activities until TSA can provide valid evidence that demonstrates that behavioral indicators can be used to identify passengers who may pose a threat to aviation security."
This is very disappointing.
To say the least.
Caught any terrorists lately in your fake cop costumes?
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