The Future of Airport Security
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To be frank, a lot of today’s airport security (I’ll mainly be talking about the TSA) is really ineffective Time and time again, routing testing by the Department of Homeland Security has shown blatant failures in the accuracy of the TSA, with fail rates as high as 95% - that’s not a typo. This is a really big problem. A single failure could be absolutely catastrophic, putting thousands of lives at risk. Airport security is not optional. The fact that the TSA is so ineffective raises the question - how do we make it better?
It’s impossible to have perfect security, but you can get pretty dang close, and someone has - Israel. At the nation’s main international airport, between the largest city (Tel Aviv) and the capital, Jerusalem, security is insanely tight. There’s multiple checkpoints, teams of behavior and counterterrorism experts interviewing passengers, and scores of undercover agents monitoring for suspicious behavior. This process is invasive, expensive, and time consuming, but it has yet to fail. This is a process that is probably scalable, albeit at great cost. This security is subjected to about 22 million passengers annually at Ben Gurion Airport, which is no small number, but nothing compared to Atlanta’s 110 annual visitors. If the TSA could develop a really solid framework based on what Israel is doing, they could likely convince Congress to shell out a few billion to implement it in the name of national security.
Obviously, not all airport security measures under development are public knowledge, for good reason. One of the most high profile programs in process is the ominously named and highly controversial Project Hostile Intent. This project comes under the Social and Behavioral Research (SBR) Program, one of the three broad program areas within the Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that “sponsors research to inform, develop, and test tools and methodologies to assess terrorist threats, understand terrorism, and improve national security.”
Project Hostile Intent aims to detect and model the behavioral cues that indicate an individual’s intent to do harm and/or deceive, according to the DHS. The technology would use a series of cameras and sensors to measure body temperature and also use AI to analyze cues like facial movements. According to the project’s Wikipedia page (so take this with a grain of salt, and the webpage used as the source, which is a testimony to the Senate in 2007 has been removed), the technology could possibly use brain scans in the future, though it’s unclear how this would work.
Project Hostile Intent has been further developed by the DHS as Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST). According to a 2008 ‘privacy impact assessment,’ FAST uses:
- A remote cardiovascular and respiratory sensor to measure heart rate and respiration
- A remote eye tracker
- Thermal cameras that provide information on the temperature of the skin in the face
- A high resolution video for looking at facial expressions and body movements
- Audio system for analyzing changes in voice pitch
- Possibly other sensors, perhaps pheromone detection
- Anonymized aggregate results of the scanned information
FAST quickly received backlash from privacy advocates, raising concerns about the level of data being collected and its accuracy. DHS science spokesman John Verrico stated in September 2008 that preliminary testing had demonstrated 78% accuracy on mal-intent detection and 80% on deception. The project is apparently still ongoing, but it’s unclear if/when it will be implemented and what legal troubles it might face, including possible Fourth and Fifth Constitutional Amendment violations it may cause.
One futuristic aspect of airport security already being implemented at airports around the country is Computed Tomography (CT) scanning. X-ray scanners, which are what have been used for decades, are much less effective than CT at detecting potential threats. For one, X-rays are modeled in 2D, while a CT scan (yep, the same kind that doctors use) are modeled in 3D, which allows for security agents to more accurately analyze the contents of a bag, including being able to visualize cross sections. CT is also much better at differentiating different types of solids, which makes it able to detect non-metal weapons like plastic explosives or “ghost” guns. A pitfall of CT technology is the fact that it emits a significantly larger dose of radiation than x-ray, which could be harmful to TSA staff who are subject to repeat exposure if the CT isn’t properly insulated.