by Jennifer Peter, Associated Press
BOSTON (AP) - Security personnel at Logan International Airport will soon start paying closer attention to passenger behavior in an effort to spot potential terrorists.
The new security measure will be launched in September, a year after hijackers boarded the two airliners in Boston and flew them into the World Trade Center towers
Specially trained state police will analyze passengers for irregular behavior and “identify people that may have hostile intentions,” airport security consultant Rafi Ron said Friday.
The program will strike a balance between safety and civil rights, officials said.
“We believe that dealing with aviation security only by technological means is not enough,” said Ron, an Israeli security expert. “Behind any terrorist attack there are people, and these people are trying to bypass any of the difficulties that are presented by technology.”
The officers, members of an anti-terrorism unit established in April, will be trained to first look for innocent explanations of the behavior and to ask a few simple questions that could clear up any confusion, Ron said.
“We assume that every passenger is a legitimate passenger,” Ron said. “We don’t start from the assumption that everyone is a suspect.”
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which have monitored passenger profiling in the wake of the attacks, had not heard of another airport instituting a similar policy.
Hodan Hassan, a spokeswoman for the American-Islamic group, said many airports have been “pretty mum about what sorts of techniques they’re using.”
Since the attacks, passenger profiling has emerged as a point of contention in the quest to improve airport safety. Civil libertarians have protested the singling out of passengers based on ethnicity or race, while airline security experts have argued that the random searching of passengers is inefficient.
“We’ve posed this as a function of behavior and not of somebody’s racial profile,” said Thomas Kinton, Logan’s aviation director. But if, upon further questioning, the person reveals a passport from a country that sponsors terrorism, the officers will not ignore that information, Kinton said.
Hassan and Reggie Shuford of the ACLU condemned profiling in any way based on race or country of origin.
But both organizations applauded the fact that Logan was training officers to identify behaviors.
“We would like there to be some sort of uniform training for what constitutes suspicious behavior so race or national origin doesn’t become a proxy for that,” Shuford said.
Kinton and Ron would not reveal which behaviors the officers would be trained to look for, or how many officers would be involved.
“Part of the concept is that you don’t always make it clear who is watching and what is being watched,” Ron said.
The officers, some in plain clothes, will be trained in “behavior pattern recognition” at the end of August, Ron and Kinton said. The program will augment existing security.
Logan’s program could help security forces be more efficient by focusing attention more narrowly on those who really pose a danger, said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley.
“I think the public is legitimately concerned about facially ridiculous candidates for scrutiny,” said Turley, a constitutional law expert who has advocated passenger profiling.
Turley, pointing out how inefficient random searches are, said that his 6-month-old was searched at an airport recently.