About two months ago, I wrote an opinion piece for the Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s website on the virtues of a “smart selectee list.” My point was that Americans are essentially programmed to throw money at terrorism, but that more effective and cheaper measures are available.
For example, following the Christmas Day bombing attempt, the Obama administration announced that it would spend some $700 million on full-body screening machines. Sure, they’ll be effective for a while, but it’s only a matter of time before someone somewhere finds a way to either beat the machine or to blow up an airline that doesn’t involve explosives smuggled onboard by a passenger. If terrorism over the last 20 years has taught us anything, it’s that terrorists adapt to beat new security measures.
Instead, here’s how my “smart selectee list” would work:
It’s time to construct a security apparatus that intelligently accounts for signs of potentially dangerous passengers while balancing risk, passenger inconvenience and privacy concerns — and saves money in the process.
Rather than purchase enough body scanners to take naked pictures of everyone boarding a flight, the TSA and National Counter Terrorism Center should review one of the least discussed but potentially most effective devices it already has on the books: the “selectee” list. …
It’s time to let the selectee list think for itself. With technological innovation, the list could be transformed into a “smart” anti-terrorism tool: Allegedly dangerous individuals would be added, but additional passenger screening is triggered only when an algorithm connects potential attackers to a suspect travel itinerary and during periods of elevated, if vague, threat levels. Individuals selected for additional screening must be shared with the airlines.
For example, if an allegedly dangerous Elizabeth Kennedy is set to travel from Dublin to the United States, her profile would trigger additional screening only when the list automatically connects her name, travel itinerary and an ongoing Ireland-based threat. If the threat is based out of, say, France, or once an analyst determines it has lapsed, she would undergo standard security procedures.
It seems like the administration is starting to come around:
Before Dec. 25, airlines were given the no-fly list of people to be barred from flights altogether and a second “selectee” list of passengers to be subjected to more thorough screening. Those lists have been expanded considerably this year and now contain about 6,000 and 20,000 names respectively, officials said.
The new system will send the airlines additional names of passengers not on either the no-fly or selectee list but identified as possible security risks because of intelligence about threats. Only the names of the passengers selected for extra screening, not the underlying intelligence, will be shared with airlines and foreign security personnel, officials said.
The details of this program remain a bit sketchy, but it would appear that the administration is linking threat-based information to travelers who share the same name as the potentially dangerous. Potentiality is an important concept in this process — the intelligence community was faulted for the Christmas attempt because it failed to “connect the dots” even though intelligence is designed to only link together credible dots. And I’d argue that in the case of that incident there weren’t credible dots to connect. There was a lot of possibly credible stuff out there, but none of it was ironclad.
This new system appears to trigger additional screening when information of unknown credibility is linked together at the point of attack. It’s a smart method that’s in stark contrast to the indiscriminate body screening of passengers. For passengers whose names come up under the new selectee process, undergoing additional screening would be a relatively minor inconvenience. But the targeted patdown would be an effective security measure that doesn’t trample civil liberties and minimizes the inconvenience for most passengers.
