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Expressions, behaviour to be scrutinized
By Ian MacLeod~Canwest News Service
From the furrowed brow to the nervously tapping foot, security personnel will soon start studying air travellers’ facial expressions and body movements to see if they could be criminals and terrorists.
Beginning next year, some air travellers will be scrutinized by airport “behaviour detection officers” for physiological signs of hostile intent — in other words: screening for dangerous people rather than just for dangerous objects.
Planning for the training and deployment of the plainclothes security officers is to begin this fall, with a pilot project expected to roll out at a major airport in 2010, the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority said yesterday. The project’s budget is about $400,000.
If successful, “behaviour pattern recognition” could land at major airports across the country.
Similar programs operate in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel, which pioneered spying on people’s expressions and body movements for involuntary and fleeting “micro-expressions” and movements suggesting abnormal stress, fear or deception.
“This might indicate a passenger has malicious intentions,” said Mathieu Larocque, spokesman for the security authority, which is responsible for pre-board screening of airport passengers. “It offers an additional security layer for the aviation system.”
The largest pilots’ union in the world has been lobbying the federal government to adopt these procedures for several years.
“We’re very, very pleased,” said Captain Craig Hall, Canadian director of the national security committee of Air Line Pilots Association International.
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration says its “Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques” program has been so successful, it now has more than 2,000 behavioural detection officers patrolling concourses and departure lounges for unusual, anxious or otherwise “suspicious” passenger behaviour.
Without revealing details, the U.S. agency said the officers are trained to discount the typical nervousness, anger and confusion that many travellers experience.
It insists the officers do not use racial, ethnic or religious profiling.
An independent panel of security and aviation experts that reviewed Canadian Air Transport Security Authority operations cautiously recommended to Transport Canada in 2007 that behavioural profiling might work in Canada.
The panel attached some conditions, including that the concept must be planned and implemented so that offensive forms of profiling by front-line personnel are minimized, if not eliminated, and that it not be a substitute for pre-board screening of carry-on luggage.
The U.S. boasts that between January and December 2006, their behavioural screening program stopped 70,000 people for questioning, resulting in upwards of 700 arrests.
But that one-in-100 hit rate involved everything from alleged money-laundering, drug and weapons possession to immigration violations and outstanding arrest warrants. None of the incidents was terrorism related.
The Transportation Security Administration said some did lead to counter-terrorism investigations, but has not elaborated.
