by explosives trace detectors. When the proportion of selectees is higher, say 10% or more, their screening will require re-equipping elevated risk screening lanes with systems that provide the highest probability of detecting sophisticated IEDs and their components, as well as weapons. The choice of screening methods, manual or using best technologies, can depend on the precision with which a pre-screening programme identifies elevated risk (or selectee) passengers. But precision (yielding a lower proportion of selectees, with resulting lower cost of screening) should not be achieved by lowering confidence that terrorists, when they do come to the checkpoints, will certainly be categorised as elevated risk and then intensively screened.
International Applications
Some nations may conclude that their air transport industries are not and will not become targets for attack by the likes of al-Qaeda terrorists. For them, maintaining the standards and recommended practices of ICAO Annex 17 will suffice. Other nations, however, will judge that they need to do more.
Like the US,
they too may find as passenger volumes increase that pre-board screening requires categorisation of passengers by risk levels, with corresponding levels of screening intensity,
from a
preponderance of trusted travellers to a small fraction of elevated risk selectees. If such nations already have satisfactory passenger pre-screening systems, all is well. But the nations that do not have a reliable pre-screening programme may quickly realise that developing and maintaining one is in large part a government function, particularly since the information and its assessment is almost bound to become classified national security material. International cooperation and harmonisation in passenger risk categorisation, though necessary, may thereby be complicated. At the AVSEC World conference, there was a lively and informative debate about the legitimacy of using passenger data, particularly the Passenger Name Record (PNR), for risk categorisation. But without intelligence and its knowledge of terrorist groups, there isn’t an adequate basis for determining the security relevance and value of data about passengers. A study by the Henry Jackson Society analyses the 171 persons who from 1997 to 2011 were convicted of al-Qaeda related crimes in the US. Among the convicted there was considerable diversity in age (mostly young, but ranging from 19 to 63), gender (mostly male, but 8 female), race, ethnicity, education, and employment. In the absence of intelligence, such
diversity makes it difficult to develop a profile with which PNR data might be usefully compared.
Intelligence: Driver of Risk-Based Security
It is noticeable that the TSA now prefaces risk-based security with another term, intelligence-driven. The resulting term, intelligence-driven risk-based security, summarises the solution to imminent overwhelming of passenger screening checkpoints. The checkpoints can be saved by categorising passengers according to their risk levels and screening them with corresponding intensity, with confidence that the categorisation is derived from reliable intelligence.
It is up to the
intelligence communities to make their products sufficiently reliable to be used for this vital purpose.
Cathal Flynn is a charter member of the Association of Independent Aviation Security Professionals. He was the FAA’s Assistant Administrator for Civil Aviation Security from 1993 to 2000.
1. Perry and Gilbey. The Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques Programme: analyzing the issues.
ASI, June 2011.
2. GAO-13-239. TSA Explosives Detection Canine Program. January 2013.
3. Robin Simcox and Emily Dyer. Al Qaeda in the United States. Henry Jackson Society, London, 2013.
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April 2013 Aviationsecurityinternational
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