According to this article, from McClatchy’s Washington Bureau, the Transportation Security Agency is now employing Behavior Detection Officers at airports to monitor passengers’ body language, behavior, and facial expressions. They’re currently deployed at “more than a dozen” airports; the TSA reportedly wants to have 500 of these agents trained and working by the end of 2008, though the article doesn’t say how many airports that would entail covering.

This is how the officers operate:

At the heart of the new screening system is a theory that when people try to conceal their emotions, they reveal their feelings in flashes that [University of California at San Francisco Professor Paul] Ekman, a pioneer in the field, calls “micro-expressions.” Fear and disgust are the key ones, he said, because they’re associated with deception.

Behavior detection officers work in pairs. Typically, one officer sizes up passengers openly while the other seems to be performing a routine security duty. A passenger who arouses suspicion, whether by micro-expressions, social interaction or body language gets subtle but more serious scrutiny.

A behavior specialist may decide to move in to help the suspicious passenger recover belongings that have passed through the baggage X-ray. Or he may ask where the traveler’s going. If more alarms go off, officers will “refer” the person to law enforcement officials for further questioning.

So, the next time the guy hands you back your shoes and asks you where you’re headed to today, he’s probably not just making conversation… as if you didn’t assume that already.

This is all sort of a domestic-beer version of Israel’s airport security, which has the drawback of being much more intrusive but the plus of actually having a shot at working.

I’ve had the pleasure of going through Israeli airport security a few times. The first time, heading to Israel on an El Al flight, the security folks grilled me about where I was going and where I was staying and why I was going, etc. etc. etc. My business was a bit odd (going to an academic conference on the topic of whether Israel needed a written constitution, with an emphasis on analyzing the U.S. Constitution), so I had a lot of explaining to do. The fact that I was on assignment for the most pro-Zionist paper in America didn’t seem to help. They even tried to trip me up by asking me if I spoke Hebrew. I said no (because, well, I don’t). But later I was asked, seemingly at random by another agent and a family in line with me, if I could translate. I, of course, said no. But it wasn’t until much later that it occurred to me that El Al has plenty of translators and didn’t need my services. On another occasion, on my way back from Israel, I could barely move for having sunburned myself on the beach in Tel Aviv. I thought Ben-Gurion security might take me down for walking so funny, but I made it through relatively unscathed.

The point is, while micro-expressions are real, I highly doubt a TSA officer with 16 hours of training can pick them up (typically, you hear about researchers studying such expressions in a lab setting, on slowed down videotape). Less intrusiveness than the Israeli system + far less training than the Israelis = far, far less effective.

The government seems to get this. They want to replace this still-being-implemented system with a computerized system that would, according to the article, use “videocams and computers to measure and analyze heart rate, respiration, body temperature and verbal responses as well as facial micro-expressions.” Sounds a lot better to me than the human version.

While the Malcolm Gladwell, Blink, argument might say that humans can read these sorts of cues well (I’m halfway through the book right now), I’d guess the ability varies quite a bit person-to-person, and I don’t trust our TSA staffing policies to put the right people in the right places. I’d greatly prefer to have a computer looking out for me.

And plenty of folks, I’m sure, won’t be happy with either solution. It is creepy being watched constantly in an airport — believe me, I know, I fly a lot for work. At the same time, you’re boarding a human-guided missile responsible not just for the lives of the passengers in the air but civilians on the ground. Our society asks for certain trade-offs between safety and security, and I’m not sure that this is an unreasonable one.

(via Sciam Observations)

UPDATE (12:50 a.m.): I just stumbled upon the fact that Professor Ekman has these CDs available that supposedly allow one to improve his or her ability to interpret facial expressions. I must say I’m intrigued.