Intelligence: a pre-requisite for risk-based security screening
By Cathal Flynn A
lmost everyone involved with air transport welcomes forecasts of the industry’s growth, such as the United
States Federal Aviation Administration’s prediction that passenger volumes will double by 2032, and IATA’s that global passenger numbers will increase from 2.8 billion in 2011 to 3.6 billion in 2016. For those responsible for aviation security, however, the welcome news is accompanied by real concern that passenger pre-board screening checkpoints, already operating near full capacity in most airports, might be overwhelmed. Solutions to the impending problems are essential.
“Managed Inclusion” In Pre✓™ US citizen frequent flyers, members of
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) programmes (Global Entry, NEXUS, SENTRI), and Canadian citizen members
of NEXUS are encouraged to use Pre✓™. Nevertheless, usage rates are still low. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, addressing the IATA AVSEC World conference on 5 March, said that only 1 in 12 passengers were then being
“...high throughput in trusted traveller checkpoint lanes is thereby obtained with almost zero increase in risk to flights...”
A partial solution to the problem of
over-crowding, which the United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has begun to implement, lies in applying risk-based security at the checkpoints. Its first premise is that the incidence of terrorists among airline passengers in the US is one in billions, or one occurrence in many years, and the vast majority of passengers, year in and year out, have no destructive intentions toward the flights they will board. It follows that if passengers can be reliably categorised
as trusted travellers - in the US as Pre✓™ (PreCheck) passengers - their screening can be much less intensive and time consuming. High throughput in trusted traveller checkpoint lanes is thereby obtained with almost zero increase in risk to flights; indeed the TSA contends that the innovation will reduce overall risk by permitting screening staff in other lanes to give more attention to a reduced number of relatively risky, relatively unknown passengers. The benefits however depend on there being a high proportion of trusted travellers and on the
reliability of their categorisation.
Pre✓™ screened, a proportion she hoped would grow to 1 in 4 by the end of this year. Even that would be far below the 50% and even 70% proportions TSA executives have suggested publicly might be achievable. In the near term at least, “managed inclusion” will be used to raise the numbers of passengers screened in
Pre✓™ lanes. Ordinary passengers, not Pre✓™
enrolees, will have their boarding and identification documents checked and, if not on watch lists, will then be directed
into Pre✓™ lanes. Where they are available, behaviour detection officers and explosives detection canine teams will also be used for additional verification of passengers’ low risk.
In principle, managed inclusion is
reasonably consistent with risk-based security. In practice, it opens the possibility of a terrorist being incorrectly categorised
for inclusion in Pre✓™ and therefore being insufficiently screened.
Its security, its
avoidance of excessive risk, depends on the thoroughness and accuracy of the intelligence (national security information and judgments) underlying the TSA’s Secure Flight programme, which matches passengers with watch lists of terrorists and persons suspected of being connected with terrorism.
If not for the addition of behaviour observation and canine explosives detection, it might be assumed that the TSA has sufficient confidence in the watch lists to rely on them for passenger risk categorisation and managed inclusion
in Pre✓™. But the addition of two such controversial measures does raise questions. In their June 2011 Avsec Opinion article, Melissa Perry and Andrew Gilbey conclude that scepticism regarding behaviour observation’s effectiveness is well warranted. They note that the technique “appears to be susceptible to a high number of false positive and false
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negative errors.” Employed in managed inclusion, the technique’s false positives might merely bar a few passengers from the quicker and more convenient
Pre✓™ screening, but the false negatives support Perry and Gilbey’s conclusion that behaviour observation “may not actually add any real benefit over and above other existing airport security measures.”
That
scepticism would pertain to the technique’s value in managed inclusion.
The TSA has been funded to deploy 120 Passenger Screening Canine (PSC) teams, and at least some are intended for use in managed inclusion. Recently, however, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported to Congress that “TSA did not determine PSC teams’ effectiveness prior to deployment.”
It is practically certain that the TSA will
correct defects reported by the GAO in its behaviour observation and passenger screening canine programmes, making them as effective as they inherently can be. For the moment, however, the two programmes do not reliably buttress Secure Flight pre-screening in determining which
passengers may be screened in Pre✓™ lanes. And Secure Flight’s effectiveness in categorising passengers by the levels of risk they pose must depend on the comprehensiveness and reliability of the intelligence that supports the national terrorist watch lists.
Elevated Risk Passengers Secure Flight must also be highly reliable in identifying passengers who pose relatively severe risks to flight security. Its matching must identify such passengers as selectees for more stringent, comprehensive inspection, for which the TSA’s term is “enhanced screening.” Airport screening checkpoints in most countries are equipped and staffed to have reasonably high probabilities of detecting the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and weapons likely to be carried by run- of-the-mill, essentially untrained terrorists. Such checkpoints, however, have alarmingly low probabilities of detecting the types and configurations of IEDs (and their components) likely to be carried by highly skilled, well trained and supported terrorists.
Some nations compensate for their
standard checkpoints’ inadequacies by implementing additional screening of selectee passengers. If there is a low proportion of such selectees, the additional screening can be manual, often augmented
April 2013 Aviationsecurityinternational
AVSEC OPINION
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