Airport security: To find the needles, reduce the haystack

If, eventually, half of each day’s passengers were to qualify as trusted on domestic flights and a third on international flights, that would be a huge reduction in the size of the haystack. Frequent flyers and airline crews, for example, collectively go through the security routine hundreds of millions of times each year. To what purpose? Imagine what taking even them out of the stack would mean in terms of saving time, money and human resources that could then be focused on the “non-trusted” travelers…

Instead of focusing on these factors, we need to develop a much broader profiling program that gives primacy to patterns of activities and behaviors. This profiling would not key primarily on race, ethnicity or nationality, but it would not totally ignore them either. Rather, it would rely primarily on intelligence and law enforcement and on consular, airline and other information related to an individual’s recent and long-term behavior. Only after those factors were examined would others be considered. We have enough data on threatening activities and behaviors to spot “needles” more effectively. We should put more resources into behavioral profiling.