Israel's top 10 airport security technologies, I

that they are in the business of looking for terrorists.”

At Ben Gurion Airport you can take a coffee on board. According to Sela, airport security personnel do not care what you take on the plane. “The security in Israel checks you as a passenger, and not the luggage. If you are cleared as a person then who cares what you bring on the plane with you?”

Kloosterman and Seal suggest these ten technologies as the top 10 Israeli technologies to keep airports safe.

1. Trace-Safe — an alternative to body scans. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration will place 950 full-body scanners at U.S. airports by the end of 2011. Many worry about the health ramifications of the radiation some of these scanners emit, while other are worried about privacy issues. An Israeli company working with a U.S. partner may have the solution.

Trace-Safe from Israel and Raptor from the United States have co-developed a chemical process, called TraceGuard, which can free particles from fabric and luggage for speedy detection and analysis.

The technology detects harmful substances and not benign ones like perfume or pharmaceuticals. It does not show false alarms, does not need filters or a cleaning. “You only want to detect the substances that you can make explosives or biological agents out of,” says Sela.

It can be integrated into scanners and magnetometers and also into a wand that can be passed over both people and luggage.

While Trace-Safe is struggling financially right now, Sela believes that TraceGuard has the potential to bring an end to the use of all other equipment at airports, including the detested body and shoe scanners. “I am among those experts who believe the full body scans are wrong and not healthy for people,” Sela told Kloosterman. “Especially since they are passing through radiation; it defeats the cause.”

2. Suspect Detection System — tracing the sweat of terror. Suspect Detection System (SDS) is an automated interrogation and background check technology for both travelers and airport employees. It is like a polygraph machine for catching terrorists — an advanced and automated filtering tool that can identify potential suspects from among tens of thousands of people.

With human selectors and security personnel there is always the danger of introducing human error into the security check. SDS’s VR-1000 has been built with the assumption that very sophisticated terrorists may not be on the wanted lists of Interpol police or DHS.

The technology works