Home » Identity & Access » Access Control

TSA's Risk-based Approach to Security

George Naccara is betting that the lift of his risk-based reforms will overcome the drag of politics and bureaucracy. And the test bed for these innovations is Boston's Logan Airport

By Scott Berinato

Page 10

While Rep. Markey introduces his Leave All Blades Behind legislation in Terminal B, Naccara gives a tour of Terminal A's high-tech baggage system, the first of its kind.

The suitcases we passed at the check-in counterall of Terminal A's checked bags, for that mattercome into this room and wend through a four-mile skein of conveyor belts. All of the belts are suspended from the ceiling, crossing paths, dipping over and under each other, diving down to a section along the floor and then rising back up; this must be what a hamster maze looks like to a hamster.

Each bag also passes through one of the seven explosives-detection machines set in the maze. The machines are MRIs for suitcases. If they find a worrisome density or shapeblocks of cheese and jars of peanut butter often set off alarms, as do books and, well, explosive devicesthen they mark the suspicious spot on the bag's MRI image and send the bag along its way, with all the benign bags, until, near the end of the maze, the bags reach the Vertisorter.

The Vertisorter is what it sounds like: a conveyer belt that sorts bags vertically. It tilts down to send a bag to its plane; up to send it to an adjacent room where more TSA screeners receive both the bag and a 3-D color image of its innards, on which the suspicious spot is marked. The screener rotates, flips and zooms the image. He switches to a high-contrast black-and-white view, superior to color for seeing wires. He slices through the 3-D image looking for things hidden inside of other things, the same way a doctor would navigate an image of a lung looking for a tumor. The screener has about a minute to decide whether to send the bag to another person for physical inspection or to return it to the Vertisorter to be sent down to its plane.

Naccara boasts that Logan completed the project on time, in 2002. He says the system has saved the feds tens of millions of dollars, reduced the number of screeners needed at Logan from more than 1,200 to 850, and, most importantly, reduced the risk of crime and terrorism in the air significantly. Far more, he says, than taking away people's Swiss army knives ever will. If he could, Naccara would have every suitcase at Logan snaking through rooms like this one. Then he'd add the suitcase MRI machines at gates to improve screening images there. He'd network the system so that images that trigger alarms could be shared instantly across the airportby TSA, Massport, the airlines, Customs, maybe even the CDC if the threat were potentially biological. All of this would increase security and free up his staff to focus on the core of his agendabehavioral profiling, SPOT.