[Zaheer]

"Mr. Mukerjee appears to have been flagged by the Behaviour Detection Officer (BDO) while in line for what appeared to be unusual behaviours. [...] it is impossible to assess what caught the Officer’s attention, but the TSA source indicates Mr. Mukerjee was already on someone’s radar before he chose to opt-out."

What 'unusual behaviors' led to him getting flagged? While maybe Mr. Mukerjee had suspicious behavior I'm skeptical of saying that his looks did not contribute to the heightened harsh treatment. Would a Caucasian male get the same treatment?

[dthunt]

I call foul on behavioral detection.

I sincerely doubt there's a way to differentiate between someone who is ill and someone who is pale and has the jitters because they're about to do something bad. I moreover call foul on the notion that there are enough of the latter set to build an effective training program to create effective BDOs.

What's actually happening here is probably that BDOs are being used to justify retroactively special treatment given to people for invented reasons. It's sort of like a false alert from a drug dog - it's a claim that you can't really cross-examine, since the supposed microexpressions someone exhibits are too fast or too small to be picked up by a camera.

[res0nat0r]

Israel has been doing behavior profiling beginning at the moment you get out of your car at the airport, and run one of the most secure airports in the world. Even though the word profiling has a bad connotation in the USA, it works.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...

[dthunt]

Supposedly the Patriot Missile was protecting Israel during the first Gulf War, but there are as far as I know zero confirmed hits (IIRC the Pentagon generously thinks that a few scuds were deflected, but Israel thinks otherwise).

The point is that just because a program is thought of as 'famously effective'　doesn't mean it actually is.

[justin66]

In their case, I would want to talk to some of the Arabs who deal with their security methods while traveling before declaring victory.

[dthunt]

(just as an addendum to the above, compare: drug dogs, in theory, and in practice, in light of recent disclosures about the DEA's 'parallel reconstruction' program.

[nandemo]

There's some info about behaviour detection here:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_profiling

It's been used by Israeli airport security and, if done properly, isn't based on ethnics or appearance. I don't think it's a bad thing as long as it's just used for screening.

However, the original account indicates that the questioning went far beyond "non-intrusive questions".