The TSA's Mental 'Coin Flip' That May Keep You From Traveling

Overhype

from the because-highly-trained-detection-officers-work-for-$10/hr dept

I am (TSA Behavioral Detection Officer) Jack’s self-delusion.

Like the rest of us, airport security screeners like to think they can read body language. TheTransportation Security Administration has spent some $1 billion training thousands of “behavior detection officers” to look for facial expressions and other nonverbal clues that would identify terrorists.

But critics say there’s no evidence that these efforts have stopped a single terrorist or accomplished much beyond inconveniencing tens of thousands of passengers a year. The T.S.A. seems to have fallen for a classic form of self-deception: the belief that you can read liars’ minds by watching their bodies.

$1 billion in taxpayer funds spent, and nothing’s safer. The only “positive” seems to be that TSA’s officials have improved their own morale.

The T.S.A.’s administrator, John S. Pistole, defended its behavior-detection program last year by saying it identified “high-risk passengers at a significantly higher rate than random screening.”

Pistole likely believes this to be true because the human brain is will betray its owner to make it happy. People generally tend to believe they’re smarter than other people and that their skills are more finely honed — whether or not the skills they claim have in fact been honed or are even possible.

The GAO (Government Accountability Office) came to an entirely different conclusion when it applied science, rather than belief, to the TSA’s expensive Behavioral Detection program.

Peer-reviewed, published research does not support whether the use of nonverbal behavioral indicators by human observers can accurately identify deception. Our review of meta-analyses and other studies related to detecting deception conducted over the past 60 years, and interviews with experts in the field, question the use of behavior observation techniques, that is, human observation unaided by technology, as a means for reliably detecting deception. The meta-analyses, or reviews that synthesize the findings of other studies, we reviewed collectively included research from more than 400 separate studies on detecting deception, and found that the ability of human observers to accurately identify deceptive behavior based on behavioral cues or indicators is the same as or slightly better than chance (54 percent).

$1 billion thrown at something as useful as a coinflip to apprehending terroists. Or rather, would be as useful as a coin flip, if it only came up heads once in one hundred coin tosses.

It noted that fewer than 1 percent of the more than 30,000 passengers a year who are identified as suspicious end up being arrested, and that the offenses (like carrying drugs or undeclared currency) have not been linked to terrorist plots.

Pistole still believes in the program, though, and there won’t be much that can convince him otherwise. For one thing, there’s a whole lot of money riding on it. For another, there’s the natural biases of the human brain. Of course, it’s protected by the DHS, the same government entity that feels so confident in its employees’ imaginary “abilities” that it argued CBP agents’ “hunches” should supersede the “reasonable suspicion” demands of the Fourth Amendment.

And, as if the human’s innate ability to convince itself it possesses skills it can’t scientifically have isn’t bad enough, the millions of dollars being poured into behavioral detection training is only making things worse. (While there were numerous sources for this information, I feel it’s most enjoyably explained by Cracked.)

[P]olice officers have to go through rigorous training to make sure they pick up on the common tells people exhibit when they lie, but all of that training is actually worse for them than no training at all. The problem is that the training focuses on signs of nervousness, like twitching and discomfort, when twitching and discomfort are also known side effects of an innocent person sitting in an interrogation room. So as you can imagine, there are a lot of false positives. There are also countless other factors that determine how much someone squirms — like their cultural background, what kind of lie they’re telling, and whether the suspect is generally a noddy, hand-and-feet-movey kind of person (how many of you reading this are fidgeting at a desk right now, tapping your foot or bouncing your knee?)

A grizzled old police officer might say, “Yeah, that training is BS! I can spot a lie thanks to my 20 years on the streets.”

Nope, sorry. They did a study on officers who’d been on the force for anywhere between three and 26 years and found that, incredibly, the longer someone’s been an officer, the worse he or she is at telling when someone’s lying.

When you base an entire program on a delusion that only gets worse with experience and training, you’ve got a nightmare on your hands. The TSA detained 30,000 people, found no terrorists, nailed a few people on ancillary charges, and when asked about it, claimed it was an amazing success.

There’s no magic ability to detect liars and the cursory conversations deployed by TSA agents to sniff out would-be terrorists aren’t nearly enough to qualify as “behavioral detection.” Some things can be learned by observing people, but there’s always going to be a ton of false positives to sift through.

Not only that, but no one wants to participate in faux-small talk with a person who wields an inordinate amount of power. Their recalcitrance can easily be “hunched” into “reasonable suspicion” by a BDO. Nearly everyone caught in these little “behavioral detection” chats is going to be nervous, because they know one simple misplaced word or action is the difference between them boarding their flight unmolested or potentially spending a few hours attempting to prove a negative to a bunch of TSA agents suffering from the delusion that they can determine suspicious behavior “just by looking.”

Filed Under: airport security, behavioral detection, tsa