SPOT is a program launched in the United States by the Transportation Security Administration to identify potential terrorists among people at an airport by a set of 94 objective criteria, all of which are signs for either stress, fear, or deception. Passengers meeting enough of the criteria are, under the program, referred for a patdown and additional screening. The criteria were initially secret, but in March 2015, The Intercept published them after obtaining the information from an anonymous source.
History
The TSA began training agents in the program in 2006, in response to the liquid bomb plot in Britain earlier that year, and officially began the program at airports across the U.S. in 2007. As of 2013, none of the few arrests that had resulted from the program had been for terrorism or related charges. The program was designed by psychologist Paul Ekman based on the Facial Action Coding System, which was developed in the late 1970s to allow psychologists to identify emotions via facial "microexpressions".
Scale
As of 2015, there were about 2,800 TSA employees working in the SPOT program. During the first six years of the program's history, $900 million had been spent on it.
Reactions
Critics of SPOT have argued that it results in racial profiling of airport passengers, and that it has produced few results. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report criticizing the TSA for deploying the program at airports throughout the country without providing scientific validation of how it could be effective. In 2012, TSA employees in Boston denounced the program and estimated that 80% of those who were pulled from security lines under it were minorities. In 2013, two reports harshly criticized SPOT on the basis that there was little evidence the program was effective. The GAO report also recommended that the program be defunded. In response to these reports, John S. Pistole, the then-director of the TSA, told Congress that he worked on the program as part of his attempt to shift the agency toward risk-based assessment of passengers, which he developed in response to criticisms of the agency's one-size-fits-all approach to screening. In 2017, the ACLU released a report concluding that the reports and studies cited by the TSA to defend SPOT undermined the premises on which the program was based. The ACLU obtained these reports and studies after winning a lawsuit they filed against the TSA in 2015, after the agency failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request.
