Report: Billion-dollar TSA program to look for suspicious passengers works ‘slightly better than cha

[unhappycamper]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/14/report-billion-dollar-tsa-program-to-look-for-suspicious-passengers-works-slightly-better-than-chance/



Report: Billion-dollar TSA program to look for suspicious passengers works ‘slightly better than chance’
By Travis Gettys
Thursday, November 14, 2013 14:51 EST

The Transportation Safety Administration has spent nearly $1 billion singling out for additional scrutiny airline passengers who agents believe are acting suspiciously, but a new report shows the practice is basically worthless.

An analysis of the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT program, by the General Accounting Office found that evidence does not support the use of behavioral indicators to identify passengers who may pose a security risk.

The report says 21 of the 25 indicators examined by behavior detection officers were considered to be subjective, and the TSA said it hoped to more clearly define those criteria.

The GAO has long argued that the program was unreliable, and its study broadly analyzed SPOT in 2011 and 2012 and summarized 400 studies over the past 60 years on the human ability to identify deceptive behavior.

[customerserviceguy]

1. Well, of course!

They forgot to include "shifty eyes" as one of the criteria. Everybody knows you can always judge (and convict) someone on that basis alone.

Do I even need the sarcasm thingy?

[unhappycamper]

2. "Do I even need the sarcasm thingy?" Let me check........

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No.

[bemildred]

3. Which means they spot the obvious ones, and likely get a lot of false positives.

Probably worse than nothing at all, i.e. intuition, experience. These "systems" create a false sense of certainty.