Regular people who call themselves “terrible travelers” may want to be careful.
Many run-of-the-mill flyers may be raising red flags without knowing, according to the Transportation Security Administration’s controversial Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program.
Under the program, which is designed to pick out travelers who could be potential terrorists, specially trained TSA officers are deployed to watch and interact with passengers going through security screening at airports, working off of a checklist of signs provided by the SPOT program. The checklist, which isn’t classified but strongly protected by the agency, was obtained by the Intercept — and the behavioral clues are, interesting.
The odds that the average, non-terrorist traveler does one or some of the things on the checklist — including “throat clearing,” “gazing down” or “excessive complaints about the screening process” — are high.
Furthermore, the SPOT program has faced scrutiny before for being ineffective. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general found in 2013 that TSA, “cannot ensure that passengers at United States airports are screened objectively, show that the program is cost-effective, or reasonably justify the program’s expansion.”
“Behavior detection, which is just one element of the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) efforts to mitigate threats against the traveling public, is vital to TSA’s layered approach to deter, detect and disrupt individuals who pose a threat to aviation,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement to the Intercept.
