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Dennis Treece and Massport: Safe Harbor

From Boston's Logan Airport to the city's waterfront shipping facilities, Massport CSO Dennis Treece patrols an anxious perimeter.

And would he be able to take certain actions guided by fluctuations in those defined values? Sure, he says, "it could cause us to raise the color level from yellow to orange, based on our new calculations, without the state telling us to do that. We might even want to tell the state that we think we ought to go to orange, and here are the reasons."High-Touch StrategiesBut numerical variables, no matter how precise, take you only so far. Security ultimately comes down to human strategies. Take, for example, the work of Israeli security consultant Rafi Ron, who recently trained members of the Massachusetts State Police in techniques pioneered by the Israeli national airline, El Al. No technologies are requiredno sensors or X-rays or metal detectorsonly the power of observation applied to human behavior. It's behavioral pattern recognition joined with a purposeful, but deceptively casual, interview technique.

The method, says Treece, "is based on the premise that anybody who's about to [commit a crime] is not acting like everybody else." A state trooper who observes someone acting unlike everybody else approaches the subject and initiates a conversation. "It might start off, 'Cold day, isn't it?' Very casual, just to see the response," he says. "What's the body language? Is the person starting to stammer and stutter and sweat? What about the eyes? Are they dilated? All these little manifestations of nervous behavior."

Treece notes that some people are simply nervous flying or are nervous whenever they talk to a cop. But Ron says that the technique's goal is to begin with an assumption that there's a reasonable explanation for the observed behavior and to find out what it is. "During the course of the interview," says Treece, "the focus is on 'Why are you here?' Even though it's a public place, [an airport is] a potentially dangerous public place.... In the course of the interview process, very quickly, the [trooper] can determine if there's something unusual going on. As the interview progresses, it becomes more and more of a law enforcement matter. And sometimes it has resulted in an arrestif not by the state police, then by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, for instance.

"It's a great system. We just have to be very careful...that we monitor [its use] so that it doesn't become viewed as another racial profiling deal," Treece says.

Treece says that Massport is compiling statistics for review by the American Civil Liberties Union once the system's been in place for a year. For its part, the ACLU says it has an open mind about the potential value and fairness of the program.