Oh well, here we go again...good article, though.
I think there is lttle doubt that profiling would provide much of a solution but the will to do it has to come from the DfT, i.e. the government. As we all know, there is no way that they will do it because it will be seen by some as being racist: that would never do, would it.
Strange that my Nigerian aviation friends also think it is probably the answer.
Several years ago, a thread on airport security was running in this very forum. My question at the time, along with others in similar vein, which brought up this very hypothesis, were repeatedly deleted. The queues at STN at the time comprised upwards of two thousand people at peak periods. Someone standing in the middle of that crowd with the right amount of explosive would have probably sent them all to the hereafter. I can't remember how long ago it was but it is a taboo subject here on PPRuNe.
The four letter word beginning with b and ending with b seems to be banned.
Standby for deletion of post.
btw, where would the queue for profiling start and finish?
A good article. However, profiling is far from foolproof.
Quote:
Customs and immigration agents intercept people on a daily basis — but at the end of a flight. They know the signs to look for.
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. There have been various studies on lie detection by law enforcement and none of them are very encouraging. When measured, most agencies only attain a 50% success rate (detecting the liar), which is the same success rate as guessing. The only agencies who do better are the CIA and similar, who use 'unorthadox' methods of interrogation. The number of illegal immigrants and ready availablility of narcotics demonstrates that these agencies' methods fall far short of perfection.
The Israelis have certainly had success using profiling for aviation security, but they are willing to pay for proper training and adequate numbers of staff directly employed by the government. Israel also has a relatively low number of aircraft and passengers when compared to the US and Europe. Should the UK/US/Australia etc introduce profiling, are they going to be willing to pay the bill or will they continue to subcontract the job to profit focussed companies that employ morons? This is what has happened with the existing security procedures, so I don't see why the MO is going to change. If profiling were introduced, I suspect that it would merely add another layer of badly trained contractors wasting travellers' time. Questioning is an inexact, instinctive skill that is difficult to teach and demands a high level of concentration. Poorly paid subcontractors with three months experience (the standard profile for aviation security professionals around here) don't have a hope of reaching an effective level of competency.
Maybe the approach needs to change, but what is more important is that the government mindset changes as well. Until governments are willing to assume responsibility for aviation security instead of shoving it off to contractors, the system will remain flawed, substandard and irritating. Otherwise, they should stop pretending that it's a high priority and let passengers and staff get on with their business.
Last edited by Worrals in the wilds : 1st July 2009 at 04:27.
If the screening machines at a particular airport were modified to show episodes of Britain's got Talent or Coronation street, so upping the concentration levels of the watchers and the walk through metal detector simply beeped randomly does anyone here seriously think that the incidence of terrorists boarding aircraft would be any different from the 'Industry Gold Standard'? Seriously now.....think about it.
But the government will not take direct responsibility because if anything happens they will be blamed and their credibility lost. That is probably why security is farmed out to third parties via the DfT. As usual it is all about politics and political correctness rather than safety.
Despite the best of intentions, when needing to employ a lot of people to fulfill the requirements of screening and or profiling, the dullness of the role the "rules of engagement" and the inevitable low wages, the net effect is going to be that the screeners are not going to be ideal candidates.
Just look at any large airport at who is performing the screening.
I hate to say it but there seems to be a lot of lowest common denominators involved.
I don't want to slander or take away from those who are highly skilled, trained and motivated, though it is hard to argue that they are in the majority.
That being said, I would not argue to remove them, though I would argue to invest more into them both in wages, training and career prospects.
And no guesses for who operates profiler training courses for a small ransom....??
In all seriousness though, profiling, behaviour pattern recognition or whatever else people want to call it, does work if executed properly! In addition to screening for would be attackers, there are other activities that are detected by this sort of behaviour recognition, such as criminal activity within the airport (shop theft, pick-pocketing etc), forged passports, people smuggling, drug trafficking and so on, that are successful byproducts of this form of security, as they all display the same behavioural characteristics. Previous comments are also valid as regards the qualitiy of staff carrying out the profiling, and quite frankly, for it to work requires total government support and funding, which I don't think you'll see until after the next successful terrorist attack on civil aviation. PB always makes a good case, but unfortunately, doesn't get much backing from the regulators!Good luck to him!
I think you need to look into that further before reaching that conclusion.
Jetglo may not be correct but guess who will have the shortest neck when when it becomes apparent that someone has managed to outwit (an oxymoron if ever these was one) our marvellous security system? Transec will say thay have designed one of the most robust security systems in the world. The airport will say they have passed all the most stringent of tests as laid down by the government. So who will be the culprit? Why, the little prat in security on minimum wage working for an agency, sub-contracted to the security company working for the airport who are regulated by Transec. For a politician that is more than arms length.
Well, as long as those gnomes with clipboards can show that every fifth passenger (and crewmember) was picked out at random (statistically provable random, that is) and had shoes removed and was groped all over then of course the security is bullet/bomb proof - the D of T says so! There are paper records to prove it!
THe fact that colleague gnome was asleep/chatting/bored at the monitor is irrelevant (cos he's replaced every 30 minutes and there are records to prove that too)
QED
This is simply a public demonstration of political and civil service arse-covering.
You'd think that in the 21st century we'd be able to come up with something a bit more sophisticated.
Of course we must have profiling. I's blindingly obvious. (Or it is to those who are genuinely interested in improving security, which doesn't seem to include our worthless politicians, overpaid & incompetent civil servants or the gnomes with clipboards...)
Last edited by Agaricus bisporus : 30th June 2009 at 11:45.
A thought about this (having seen a 'shoe sniffer' last week at BCN Terminal B rather than having passengers remove shoes at baggage control) - Is it not perhaps a better option to increase the use of detection devices to offer a degree of security to crowds / queues that do not rely on human charcteristics, either for their operation (no matter how random any operator believes they are working their is always a pattern that can be monitored by those wishing to watch or review pictures on monitors and see any pattern of use) or continued use (leading to operator fatigue in some form)?
Visitor control and tracking system - Patent 7541926 is an example - with some interesting comments about the requirements for tracking of persons or crowd control methods ( in the section concening the background to the invention - section 2, para 3...). The patent described uses a RFID chip on an item that persons carry whilst at an attraction etc that allows their tracking and intervention if needed. This at an airport would be fairly easy to set up I guess - a check-in 'pass' for passengers collected on entering the airport that is returned to staff on arriving at the gate for departure for example, and the attached link has further links to various other systems that can detect devices on a person. Using camera images of persons and their behaviour from pictures taken on arrival and then assessing the 'degree of threat' posed by a person takes a lot of training and skill - even a mechanical aid that looks at a persons movements needs a lot of setting up to be accurate, and their is stil the need to tackle the person of interest once on a site.
Could a 'sniffer' device not be placed at each / every entrance to passengers, as well as perhaps staff only accesses to cover the a possible exploitation of any perceived weak link, for at least a degree of detection? I am curious as to whether these work effectively.
I'm aware that there are people that would consider themselves above the need for proving they pose no threat - but like the baggage rules of some carriers - 'you do as we say or you go home' - a simple system for everyone makes for no discrimination and may be practical....
Just wondered if anyone has ideas about the use of these machines. Not suggesting they would be always the solution, but I'd be interested in any comments.
Further questioning of suspicious passengers can be carried out by the existing airport police (disclaimer: I'm only familiar with the Australian setup). If airport staff, be they screeners or otherwise, are educated to refer people they feel unsure about and the police are trained and resourced to question them further, then dodgy people should be checked further and hopefully would-be terrorists and other criminals should be intercepted before boarding. This can be done without an extra layer of profiling staff.
Any pax has to interact with several staff. At the very least, they must pass through screening, present their boarding pass and speak to a flight attendant on boarding the aircraft. If any of those staff members have the confidence to refer someone who 'just doesn't seem right' and that person is then questioned, there is a greater chance of discovering anomalies. I believe that most airport staff deal with enough passengers on a daily basis to quickly establish what is normal and what isn't. They are a valuable security tool that has largely been ignored by the current system.
In my experience one of the biggest problems at airports is that non LEA staff will often deal with someone 'suspicious', but lack the confidence, know-how or motivation to contact the law enforcement agency about it. Additionally, many LEA staff are ill-equipped to follow up these referrals further, or do not believe that their agency will back them up.
The humiliation involved in passing security discourages me from airline travel. We drive whenever practical, even if it costs more. I guess the sheeple don't mind.
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Had a thought about profiling as a technique. In the short term it might work. Once counter-profile training was established its success would tail off. We, in the shape of SOE, had a fair degree of success in counter profiling with agents in France. The Germans, in contrast, did not have the same success in Britain.
The difference could be put down to the skill, or lack of skill, in false identity.
The part about earlier search before entering the terminal is more relevant. In Chennai, 9 years ago, no one got in to the terminal unless you had a ticket.
The immigration people do profiling. It might not be obvious, but the number of times I've turned up at LHR T3 for a flight to the US in the morning and the passport exit control wasn't manned is huge. The times I've been there in the evening (admittedly fewer) with the flights to Asia, it's been manned.
I've never quite worked out what the shoe inspection thing just after that point is for, my shoes have a tendency to set off a metal detector so I send them through the initial x-ray and pointed walk to the left of the shoe inspection because there's no point in doing it twice. No one has ever questioned me, it appears that most people come through the passport booths, see another queue and join it!
An example of how security works.........or doesn't.
Mrs S was on FR1286 to EDI out of MRS MP2 yesterday evening. When she got to the gate prior to boarding there was a lot of wailing and crying from the front of the queue. It turned out that there was a woman with two young girls whose names on their tickets did not match what was on their travel ID. The woman tried to explain that the children's names had changed due to a divorce but she had not got round to getting their docs changed. She said they had given the same explanation at security and passport control and were apparently told "give it a try". The Ryanair staff were having none of it and the family were denied boarding.
My seat was changed at check in, after initially being allocated. Major "First World, Western" airport, max security.
I got through Immigration and passport control, and two security checkpoints with no problem, the final scrutiny at the aircraft door noticed that my boarding card wasn't the same name as my passport !!
( but then ........ I hadn't noticed either ! just stuffed it in my coat pocket and walked off )
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