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

Even if Logan manages to hold the partnerships together, Naccara's vision for security faces other obstacles. Troubling media reports of poor judgment on the part of TSA screeners at security checkpoints surface regularlyfrom improper pat downs to unusually harsh detainments. (Discipline is a heavily regulated process; in Boston a barrel-chested ex-Marine named George Barris is in charge of it. In the Ops Center, he held up a stack of paper, about 80 pages thick, which he said concerned a single complaint against one screener.) Naccara believes most lapses are a function of staffing challenges. TSA screeners at Logan Airport view 2.1 million images a month. "It is a repetitive, thankless job where you're asked to invade the personal space of people who are already nervous about flying," he observes.

Perhaps because of this, TSA suffers high turnover, another factor working against the long-term success of the Logan experiment. An internal review found that many who leave TSA are staying in government jobs, but move to agencies where the work is less mind-numbing and the job appears to have a career track. Naccara's vision of risk-based decision making may improve the turnover problem, because it aims in part to reduce the repetitive aspects of screening and introduce more variety. Naccara hopes the behavioral profiling job will give TSA some of the allure sought by those who would decamp to other agencies.

But behavioral profiling itself carries another set of challenges. As the program becomes more public, concerns about racial profiling have been raised. The American Civil Liberties Union sued and then settled with TSA in 2003 over the practice in its earliest stages of development (a case involving the arrest and detention of a doctor of Indian descent by federal air marshals in Philadelphia). And in late 2004, an ACLU lawyer who is black says he was detained by state police at Logan Airport for no good reason. This is likely how it will be with SPOT; if concerns about racial profiling derail it, then the gravity goes out of Naccara's risk-based solar system.

TSA's Webster says that behavioral profiling focuses on physical cues, not appearance. "In fact, if you're profiling by race, you're doing it wrong, and you will miss people who would do you ill will," he says. But no one is perfectly objective, and opponents point to studies showing that people profile racially without even realizing it.

Naccara acknowledges all of the concerns but doesn't waver from his belief in SPOT. To allay fears, he says, he's hoping to get an endorsement from the ACLUas he rolls out SPOT across the country. But he recognizes and worries about the problem. "One major incident and all this work could be for nothing," he says fretfully. Adds Ventresca, "We'll have to get through a couple of incidents and accusations before [behavioral profiling] is accepted. But we believe in it. We know it works."