The US Transportation Security Administration is unable to prove that an expensive and controversial pat-down program does not screen airline passengers based on race, according to a report by the inspector general in the Department of Homeland Security.
The Screening of Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT)
program was instituted in 2004 and has long been criticized for
allowing untrained officers to use race as an excuse to
scrutinize travelers. The inspector general found there is no
sufficient way to gauge the program’s effectiveness, and to boot,
the program lacks financial foresight.
“As a result, the TSA cannot ensure that passengers at
United States airports are screened objectively, show that the
program is cost-effective, or reasonably justify the program’s
expansion,” the inspector general said in the report
released Tuesday.
It is illegal in the US to screen passengers based on their race,
ethnicity or religion.
The “behavioral detection program” was imagined as
another method for the TSA to identify potential terrorists
before they passed through an airport’s security gate. Agents
would try to engage travellers in conversation, attempting to
decipher non-verbal cues indicating nervousness or hesitancy to
speak with the TSA. They currently do so, often by walking
through a security line, but without any training on what
behavior indicates that someone is a threat.
Thirty TSA officers who worked in Boston’s Logan Airport
complained to the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts
last year that the program was used to question Hispanics
traveling to Florida and African-American men wearing backwards
baseball hats.
Those officers reported questioning the passengers based on
demands from superiors in upper management, who hoped the closer
inspection would yield arrests on outstanding warrants or
immigration issues, among other charges.
Law enforcement, acting on referrals from TSA officers, made
1,083 arrests in the first 4.5 years of the SPOT program. Not one
of those arrests, according to Bloomberg News, was for
terrorism-related charges.
More than 2,800 TSA agents work in the SPOT program, which has so
far cost American taxpayers $878 million.
This article originally appeared on: RT