Nervous Flyers Catch Security Eye

The next time you fly, airport screeners may spend more time looking at you than at your bags. The Transportation Security Administration is testing behavior observation programs at some U.S. airports.

The agency plans to train screeners at 40 airports in the technique, which is called "behavior detection" or "behavior pattern recognition."

According to George Naccara, federal security director at Boston's Logan Airport, the screeners will be looking for some "physical manifestation of stress or fear or deception. Those are all definitely linked to criminal activity and, we think, to terrorism."

Naccara, who has been using the program in Boston for more than two years, spoke to The Early Show's Tracy Smith about it.

If signs of stress are a trigger, how does a screener tell the difference between a terrorist and a nervous flyer?

"Certainly most people have some nervousness in flying," Naccara says, "but generally we're looking for other indicators and it requires an aggregate number to get us involved and to potentially get the law enforcement officials involved."

The technique certainly sounds more subjective than, say, searching a bag for a knife. That has again raised concerns about racial profiling, or targeting certain people because of their ethnic appearance, a foreign accent or dress.

"We are training for objective behavior characteristics," Naccara responds. "Certainly, there is some interpretation, but there has to be such an aggregate number of concerns before we do get involved, and there will be constant review and oversight and analysis of the data to be sure their folks are performing in a proper manner."

During the two years that Logan has been using the program, and over the holidays as it was introduced at several other airports, Naccara says, there have been a number of arrests of suspects identified through behavior observation. He cited cases in which suspects were apprehended for taking excessive cash out of the country, having illegal alien status, and carrying drugs.

But the pressing question is whether behavioral observation techniques might have stopped the 9/11 hijackers, who passed through airport security systems and boarded planes in order to carry out their devastating act of destruction.

Naccara, like most Americans, has seen the security tapes from Sept. 11, 2001. "We noticed some of their actions might have raised our suspicions," he says. "I can't say unequivocally we would have identified them in advance."