'Behavior Detectives' Report Card Key to TSA Expansion

WASHINGTON (March 24) -- As President Barack Obama's nominee to head the Transportation Security Administration calls for increasing the number of officers trained to pick out suspicious behavior, officials at the Department of Homeland Security await the results of a key study that they hope will validate the controversial program.

Called Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT, the program involves using specially trained behavior detection officers to look for suspicious behavior in passengers, who are then selected for secondary screening. While the program's effectiveness has drawn scrutiny, a study being conducted by the American Institutes for Research is looking at whether those trained officers are any better than random screenings at picking out potential problem passengers.

If the results are positive, they may lend credence to retired Maj. Gen. Robert Harding's call to expand the agency's 2,000-strong force of behavior detection officers. Harding, who testified Tuesday on Capitol Hill, advocated expanding the program, citing Israel as an example of a security system relying on detecting suspicious behavior.

"We should move even closer to an Israeli model where there's more engagement with passengers," Harding said, according to Reuters. "I think that increases the layers and pushes the layers out."

Even though the program has already deployed behavior detection officers at selected airports around the country, there have been conflicting claims about its efficacy. From January 2006 to November 2009, more than 232,000 people were referred for additional screening at the security checkpoint by behavior detection officers, according to numbers TSA provided to AOL News. Of those, 1,710 were eventually arrested and more than 2,400 were "referred for continued investigation."

"TSA has received less than five complaints during the last four years in which approximately 232,000 referrals were made for additional screening," TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis told AOL News. "These statistics speak to the program's seamless integration into the airport environment and non-intrusive observation techniques."

While TSA cites those numbers as a success, critics point out that those numbers mean that less than 1 percent of the people identified by behavior detection officers for additional screening were actually found to have done something illegal. Moreover, the critics note, there have no known cases of a behavior detection officer catching someone actually plotting a terrorist attack on an aircraft.

The SPOT program is based in part on the work of Paul Ekman, a psychologist who has worked with detecting emotional states using micro-facial expressions and has helped train the TSA behavior detection officers to spot those expressions, and other signs of unusual behavior.

Ekman is one of the best in the field, said Stephen Fienberg, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has looked at the program. "The problem is the domain is not very good," he said. "And, even if [Ekman] could do the detection, how well could he retrain someone to do it for a problem for which there has been almost no research?"

But Ekman, who continues to consult for TSA, maintains the program is effective and said the initial results of the independent study validate his work. "Enough of it is done to know it's working," he told AOL News in an interview. "There's no way, with the way they collected the data, or analyzed it, that the results will change; it may get better, but it will not get worse."

TSA, for its part, says the final results of the study won't be known for almost another year.

Carl Maccario, a program analyst at TSA who helped establish the SPOT program, said he believes the program is effective but acknowledges that for the time being, there's no hard statistical proof to show that the behavior detection officers are any better than random screenings.

"That's the purpose of the validation study," he said.