Questioning TSA's behavior monitoring program
Robert Burns, who is nin charge of implementing TSA’s behavior detection program at airport, admits that TSA’s behavior detection officers will be looking both for people who exhibit suspicious and nervous behavior — and for those who do not, because failure to appear nervous as evidenced by monitored bodily functions, “is just as indicative of being something that has to be resolved” as is the person who exhibits those signs”; former Congressman Bob Barr says: “In other words, you can’t win”
Former Congressman Bob Barr of Georgia is a conservative Republican — but of a type which is becoming more and more rare. Just how rare? Barr, after leaving Congress, joined the ACLU. The reason? Barr is a libertarian — he even ran as the candidate of the Libertarian Party in the last presidential elections and he does not like intrusive government.
In his recent column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Barr writes that two years ago he wrote that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was deploying “Behavior Detection Officers” (BDOs) at America’s airports to watch for “suspicious” behavior exhibited by people at those facilities. The program purported to teach undercover TSA employees to scan people at airports — not just passengers waiting to pass through security, but everyone — for tell-tale signs of nervousness, which could then lead to their being interrogated and possibly arrested.
“I complained at the time,” he writes, “of this significant expansion of TSA’s jurisdiction (the ‘mission creep’ that seems to bedevil virtually every government agency), and reminded readers of the evils of attempting to “profile” people based on behavior characteristics.”
Earlier this year, he wrote again about TSA’s fixation with technology, as evidenced by its plan greatly to expand the number of full-body x-ray machines at airports.
“Well, those loveable folks at TSA (and their bosses at the parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security) have taken yet another step in their relentless drive to bring ‘1984’ front and center to America’s airports,” Barr writes. “Eager always to take advantage of the willingness of passengers to surrender all sense of privacy if made to feel safe, DHS is spending millions of our tax dollars to develop technology that would remotely monitor certain bodily functions and alert TSA employees whenever someone is exuding signs of nervousness.”
Now, TSA is supposed to ensure that passengers boarding commercial aircraft are not boarding with explosives, firearms or other weapons. “Its job is not to practice ‘robo-scanning’ or ‘behavior detection’ of people simply because they happen to have a need to enter an airport or take a commercial airline flight.
People should not be subject to having their eye movements, their skin temperature, their heartbeat, their perspiration, their breathing patterns, or any other bodily functions remotely scanned and analyzed by some government employee,” Barr writes.
What upsets Barr especially is the fact that according to the behavioral monitoring program manager, the technology and its human screeners would be looking not only for persons exhibiting “elevated levels” of those bodily functions deemed suspicious (including “fidgeting”). They would also target people not exhibiting such signals. “In the view of project manager [Robert] Burns, failure to appear nervous as evidenced by monitored bodily functions, ‘is just as indicative of being something that has to be resolved,’ as is the person who exhibits those signs.”
Barr is justifiably puzzled — and angry:
In other words, you can’t win. If your bodily functions convey evidence of nervousness, you would catch the attention of the TSA screeners; but if you don’t exhibit any such signs as monitored by the machinery, you’d fall within their sights as well, because you’d be presumed to be deliberately attempting to avoid detection.
