TSA screeners being trained to monitor people, not just bags

GARY Wexler of Valley Village, who flies several times a year to Tel Aviv on business, is grilled regularly by the staff of El Al Israel Airlines:

Does he have family in Israel? When did he learn Hebrew? Why?

Then there was this puzzler: "On Passover, how many cups of wine do you drink?"

But Wexler, who owns a marketing company, doesn't mind. Instead, he said, when he heard about the jet-bombing plot in London this month, he thought, "Thank God I'm flying El Al."

Call it what you will -- profiling, psychological screening, behavior detection or just nosiness -- it's the secret to thwarting terrorism at El Al, which is widely regarded as the world's safest airline, according to security experts and passengers.

From the time you make your El Al reservation, they say, to the time you step off the plane at your destination, you're being checked out by computer and by the airline's agents, in uniform and out.

Now this strategy, albeit in a modest form, is coming to U.S. airports, courtesy of the Transportation Security Administration, which has dubbed it Screening Passengers by Observation Technique, or SPOT.

For an agency best known for its catalog of banned baggage items, this program, which trains screeners to watch for suspicious behavior by passengers, would be a sea change in the way the agency operates.

Already opponents are lining up: Civil libertarians worry that screening may slip into racial profiling. Security consultants say we should shift resources to explosives-detecting technology. Congressmen balk at possibly adding TSA personnel.

In fact, TSA began testing a version of SPOT three years ago at Boston's Logan International Airport, said Ann Davis, the agency's Boston-based spokeswoman for the Northeast. It is based on a program that Rafi Ron, former chief security officer of the Israeli Airport Authority, helped police at Logan develop after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"It is a derivative of a program by the Israelis," Davis said.

In the TSA version, she said, uniformed officers in and around security checkpoints scan passengers for "involuntary physical and psychological reactions" that behavioral scientists say may signal stress, fear or deception. (The TSA declined to be more specific about reactions it monitors.)

Officers also "may engage the passenger in casual conversation to observe the response," she added. If a passenger shows enough suspicious behaviors, Davis said, that person may be sent to secondary screening or questioned by police.