BOSTON, Massachusetts - August 2, 2011 - Boston’s TSA screeners - part of a security force whose competency has come under fire nationwide - soon will be carrying out sophisticated behavioral inspections under a first-in-the-nation program that’s already raising concerns of racial profiling, harassment of innocent travelers, and longer lines.
The training for the Israeli-style screening - a projected $1 billion national program dubbed Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques - kicks off today at Logan International Airport and will be put to use in Terminal A on August 15. It requires screeners to make quick reads of whether passengers pose a danger or a terror threat based on their reactions to a set of routine questions.
But security experts wonder whether Transportation Safety Administration agents are up to the challenge after an embarrassing string of blunders - including patting down a 95-year-old grandmother in Florida and making her remove her adult diaper, and frisking a 3-year-old girl who screamed “stop touching me” at a checkpoint in Tennessee.
“I’m not convinced that the TSA has good enough people to make the Israeli approach work on a large scale,” said Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who has followed the TSA at his blog, Instapundit.com.
But he noted, “Almost anything would be an improvement over the clown show we’ve got now.”
