TSA Is Wasting $200 Million on Behavioral Techniques For Security, GAO Says
Skift Take
Are behavioral security techniques ineffective or does the TSA merely not know what it is doing? That's a legitimate question given Israel's success in pioneering behavioral techniques at airports.
U.S. Transportation Security Administration efforts costing $200 million a year to spot potential terrorists by observing behavior are ineffective and lawmakers should limit funding, the Government Accountability Office said.
TSA’s techniques couldn’t be validated in a review of 400 studies of behavior detection spanning 60 years, the GAO said. A review of the program’s referrals and resulting arrests -- none of them related to terrorism -- showed it’s barely more effective than chance, the GAO said.
The program “is fundamentally flawed, cannot be proven effective, and should no longer be funded with taxpayer dollars,” Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the House Homeland Security Committee’s senior Democrat, said in a statement reacting to the report released today.
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