Airport Security Theater

I used to love flying. I was in love with the mystique of travel with its promise of places and people unknown and exotic. Airports meant the anticipation of adventure. I used to love flying, but not anymore.

Air travel now means long waits and foolish questions, intrusive searches—irritating and inconvenient regulations. First they confiscated our shampoo—then made us take off our shoes—later on came the full body scan. The first time I was told to step up to the line and spread my arms for the scanner, I felt like I was being arrested. I was offended and resentful - but like the rest of the flying public-I complied. The second time, we were herded like sheep; but this time I worried about how easily we all adapted. After all, I told myself, like you probably tell yourself, safety in the skies is of paramount concern.

But do these searches and restrictions really make us safer? The safest airport in the world is Ben Gurion Airport in Israel. Given their dangerous neighborhood, and the number of terrorists who target the country, it seemed like a good place to examine what really makes airport safety succeed.

Most countries, including the U.S., rely on searches to prevent air attacks. They search bags and travelers looking for weapons, or explosives. Israel does that as well, but they also focus on the human factor. The Israelis use behavior pattern recognition known in the security community as BPR.

What BPR tries to do is identify a pattern that predicts a terrorists behavior before it has taken place. This is unlike criminal profiling used by the FBI and made popular on the TV show Criminal Minds, which is a retrospective approach: the FBI starts with a crime scene, and tries to identify characteristics of individuals who might have committed such an act after it has taken place.

But what about the Civil Liberties issues that worry Human Rights Groups and Muslim Civil Liberties Advocacy Associations?

Despite the worries of civil libertarians, BPR doesn't depend upon racial profiling, although race is not ignored. Their focus is on behavior. After all, the only terrorist attack that took place in Israel's airport, back in 1972, was committed by the Japanese Red Army terror group.

BPR looks for unusual behavior—a big jacket worn on a warm day, an international traveler with no luggage—and follows it with friendly and persistent questioning. A traveler who says he's coming to visit family might be asked, "What are your relatives' names? Where do they live?" Body language and facial expressions are closely observed during these interviews.

But does behavior pattern recognition work? Some critics have pointed to false positives-where innocent people are prevented from flying or even arrested. The answer is complex. Physical and invasive search methods that are currently in use in the United States and Europe have exposed all sorts of criminal acts such as drug transport, but we could find no reports of physical searches alone discovering, let alone preventing, a terrorist attempt. There are no published reports of the success rate of BPR either. But there is one well-known case, back in December 1999, when an alert customs agent at the U.S.-Canadian border stopped Ahmed Ressam, the Millennium bomber, trying to smuggle bomb-making equipment into Washington State.

Several airport employees were uneasy about Richard Reid and reported their concerns, but a physical search of the would-be shoe bomber failed to find anything, and he was allowed to board the plane.

Despite the popularity of the TV series, Criminal Minds, which features FBI profilers, research indicates that on average their accuracy is unreliable. In the mid-1990s, the British Home Office analyzed 184 crimes, to see how many times profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. The profile worked in only five of those cases. That's a mere 2.7 per cent.

In fact, most attempts at terrorist attacks in the U.S. to date have been prevented by alert civilians...and luck: think of the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, and the Times Square bomber.

So how does a high risk target like Ben Gurion airport maintain its safety record? It does it by combining all approaches. First, every car that enters the airport perimeter is checked. Next, an officer with intensive training in BPR interviews each and every traveler. Every bag is x-rayed. Security is similarly tight for cargo and work areas of the airport.

As Raphael Ron puts it "We try to think like the terrorist. And we have to make sure that when we lock the front door, we don't leave the back door open!"