The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has spent $1 billion operating a passenger behavioral profiling system based on junk science, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Officially started in 2007, the program, which hasn't caught any terrorists to date, is called Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT), and trains agents in the art of "behavior detection." Agents observe passengers in airport screening areas to detect behaviors the TSA associates with stress, fear or deception.
But the ACLU alleges in its lawsuit that the screening techniques are "discriminatory, ineffective, pseudo-scientific and wasteful of taxpayer money," reported AllGov.
The ACLU noted that even the Government Accountability Office said in 2010 that the "TSA deployed SPOT nationwide before first determining whether there was a scientifically valid basis for using behavior detection and appearance indicators as a means for reliably identifying passengers as potential threats in airports." The GAO found that SPOT's success rate is "the same as or slightly better than chance."
Though the TSA has a zero-tolerance policy for singling out people based on ethnicity, the ACLU says that the agency does just that.
"Passengers, as well as behavior detection officers themselves, have complained that this process results in subjecting people of Middle Eastern descent or appearance, African Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities to additional questioning and screening solely on the basis of their race," the lawsuit says.
It adds, "Although the TSA has been using behavior detection techniques in some form since 2003, there is no known instance in which these techniques were responsible for apprehending someone who posed a security threat."
The validity of such a program is even further called into question considering the TSA accidentally revealed in 2013 that it had concluded that "terrorist threat groups present in the Homeland are not known to be actively plotting against civil aviation targets or airports."
