Sharon Weinberger has just published a really interesting article in Nature on the limits of behavioral profiling.
“Simply put, people (including professional lie-catchers with extensive experience of assessing veracity) would achieve similar hit rates if they flipped a coin,” noted a 2007 report1 from a committee of credibility-assessment experts who reviewed research on portal screening.
“No scientific evidence exists to support the detection or inference of future behaviour, including intent,” declares a 2008 report prepared by the JASON defence advisory group. And the TSA had no business deploying SPOT across the nation’s airports “without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment”, stated a two-year review of the programme released on 20 May by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the US Congress.
Suffice it to say, this is discouraging news. SPOT promised to enhance security without relying on racial profiling and other methods that have raised civil liberties concerns. Fortunately, Weinberger points to potentially more promising avenues for research. Structured interviews have proven fairly effective. The trouble is that structured interviews are very labor-intensive, and difficult to deploy at high-volume U.S. transport facilities. That, however, is more than can be said of SPOT, described in the article as an abject failure and thus a vast waste of money and time.