Since people have been up in arms about both pat-downs and racial profiling, the TSA has been busy looking for something else — something that hopefully works, since everything they’ve tried so far has yet to catch a single terrorist. For their next trick, they’re taking a page from Israel (who is like the world expert in dealing with Arab terrorism) and trying out ‘behavioral profiling’, starting at Boston’s Logan airport. Everyone going through security is now going to get a little conversation, during which what will most definitely be highly-trained and competent agents will assess how suspicious you act — not look; definitely not how Arab you look.
They’ll be looking for any of 35 subtle, involuntary cues that show you’re nervous about flying — which you could be either because it’s your first time on an airplane, or that a stranger is probing you with personal questions, or that you’re looking to blow up the plane with the C4 you had sown into your appendix. Most, or if we’re honest, probably all of the positives will be false positives, so failing the test doesn’t mean anything more than getting selected for a pat-down.
No word on how many thousands of extra agents they hired to deal with the fact that they now have to spend a minute chatting you down, as opposed to the 10 seconds to look at your ID and boarding pass. But again, if we’re honest, they probably haven’t hired anyone new and will just tell us to now get to the airport 4 hours ahead of time, due to ‘enhanced’ security. Which, when did ‘enhanced’ come to mean “really annoying and ineffective”?
From NPR
You have more useful info than the British had colonies pre-WWII.