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Can the science of deception detection help to catch terrorists? Sharon Weinberger takes a close look at the evidence for it.

In August 2009, Nicholas George, a 22-year-old student at Pomona College in Claremont, California, was going through a checkpoint at Philadelphia International Airport when he was pulled aside for questioning. As the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees searched his hand luggage, they chatted with him about innocuous subjects, such as whether he'd watched a recent game.

Inside George's bag, however, the screeners found flash cards with Arabic words — he was studying Arabic at Pomona — and a book they considered to be critical of US foreign policy. That led to more questioning, this time by a TSA supervisor, about George's views on the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Eventually, and seemingly without cause, he was handcuffed by Philadelphia police, detained for four hours, and questioned by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents before being released without charge.

George had been singled out by behaviour-detection officers: TSA screeners trained to pick out suspicious or anomalous behaviour in passengers. There are about 3,000 of these officers working at some 161 airports across the United States, all part of a four-year-old programme called Screening Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT), which is designed to identify people who could pose a threat to airline passengers.

It remains unclear what the officers found anomalous about George's behaviour, and why he was detained. The TSA's parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has declined to comment on his case because it is the subject of a federal lawsuit that was filed on George's behalf in February by the American Civil Liberties Union. But the incident has brought renewed attention to a burgeoning controversy: is it possible to know whether people are being deceptive, or planning hostile acts, just by observing them?

Some people seem to think so. At London's Heathrow Airport, for example, the UK government is deploying behaviour-detection officers in a trial modelled in part on SPOT. And in the United States, the DHS is pursuing a programme that would use sensors to look at nonverbal behaviours, and thereby spot terrorists as they walk through a corridor. The US Department of Defense and intelligence agencies have expressed interest in similar ideas.

Yet a growing number of researchers are dubious — not just about the projects themselves, but about the science on which they are based. "Simply put, people (including professional lie-catchers with extensive experience of assessing veracity) would achieve similar hit rates if they flipped a coin," noted a 2007 report from a committee of credibility-assessment experts who reviewed research on portal screening.

"No scientific evidence exists to support the detection or inference of future behaviour, including intent," declares a 2008 report prepared by the JASON defence advisory group. And the TSA had no business deploying SPOT across the nation's airports "without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment", stated a two-year review of the programme released on 20 May by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the US Congress.

In response to such concerns, the TSA has commissioned an independent study that it hopes will produce evidence to show that SPOT works, and the DHS is promising rigorous peer review of its technology programme. For critics, however, this is too little, too late.

The writing's on the face

Most credibility-assessment researchers agree that humans are demonstrably poor at face-to-face lie detection. SPOT traces its intellectual roots to the small group of researchers who disagree — perhaps the most notable being Paul Ekman, now an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco. In the 1970s, Ekman co-developed the 'facial action coding system' for analysing human facial expressions, and has since turned it into a methodology for teaching people how to link those expressions to a variety of hidden emotions, including an intent to deceive. He puts particular emphasis on 'microfacial' expressions such as a tensing of the lips or the raising of the brow — movements that might last just a fraction of a second, but which might represent attempts to hide a subject's true feelings. Ekman claims that a properly trained observer using these facial cues alone can detect deception with 70% accuracy — and can raise that figure to almost 100% accuracy by also taking into account gestures and body movements. Ekman says he has taught about one thousand TSA screeners and continues to consult on the programme.

Ekman's work has brought him cultural acclaim, ranging from a profile in bestselling book Blink — by Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine — to a fictionalized TV show based on his work, called Lie to Me. But scientists have generally given him a chillier reception. His critics argue that most of his peer-reviewed studies on microexpressions were published decades ago, and much of his more recent writing on the subject has not been peer reviewed. Ekman maintains that this publishing strategy is deliberate — that he no longer publishes all of the details of his work in the peer-reviewed literature because, he says, those papers are closely followed by scientists in countries such as Syria, Iran and China, which the United States views as a potential threat.

The data that Ekman has made available have not persuaded Charles Honts, a psychologist at Boise State University in Idaho who is an expert in the polygraph or 'lie detector'. Although he was trained on Ekman's coding system in the 1980s, Honts says, he has been unable to replicate Ekman's results on facial coding. David Raskin, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, says he has had similar problems replicating Ekman's findings. "I have yet to see a comprehensive evaluation" of Ekman's work, he says.

Ekman counters that a big part of the replication problem is that polygraph experts, such as Honts and Raskin, don't follow the right protocol. "One of the things I teach is never ask a question that can be answered yes or no," Ekman says. "In a polygraph, that's the way you must ask questions." Raskin and Honts disagree with Ekman's criticism, saying that Ekman himself provided the materials and training in the facial-coding technique.

Yet another objection to Ekman's theory of deception detection is his idea of people who are naturally gifted at reading facial expressions. These "wizards", Ekman argues<bibr rid='b2 b3'/>, are proof that humans have the capability to spot deception, and that by studying those abilities, others can be taught to look for the same cues. But in a critique of Ekman's work, Charles Bond, a psychologist retired from Texas Christian University in Forth Worth, argues that Ekman's wizard theory has a number of flaws — perhaps the most crucial being that the most successful individuals were drawn out of a sample pool in the thousands. Rather than proving these people are human lie detectors, Bond maintains, the wizardry was merely due to random chance. "If enough people play the lottery, someone wins," says Bond.

Ekman says that Bond's criticism is a "ridiculous quibble" and that the statistics speak for themselves. The wizards' scores were based on three different tests, he says, making it impossible to assign their high success rate to chance. Bond replies that he took the three tests into account, and that doing so doesn't change his conclusion.

Leap of logic

But there is yet another problem, says Honts. Ekman's findings are "incongruent with all the rest of the data on detecting deception from observation". The human face very obviously displays emotion, says Maria Hartwig, a psychology professor at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But linking those displays to deception is "a leap of gargantuan dimensions not supported by scientific evidence", she says.

This point is disputed by one of Ekman's collaborators, Mark Frank, a psychologist at the University at Buffalo in New York. Although Frank acknowledges that many peer-reviewed studies seem to show that people are not better than chance when it comes to picking up signs of deception, he argues that much of the research is skewed because it disproportionately involves young college students as test subjects, as opposed to police officers and others who might be older, more motivated and more experienced in detecting lies. Moreover, he says, when law-enforcement officials are tested, the stakes are often too low, and thus don't mimic a real-world setting. "I think a lot of the published material is still important, good work about human nature," says Frank. "But if you want to look at the total literature, and say, let's go apply it to counter-terrorism, it's a huge mistake."

A confounding problem is that the methodology used in SPOT, which is only partially based on Ekman's work, has never been subjected to controlled scientific tests. Nor is there much agreement as to what a fair test should entail. Controlled tests of deception detection typically involve people posing as would-be terrorists and attempting to make it through airport security. Yet Ekman calls this approach "totally bogus", because those playing the parts of 'terrorists' don't face the same stakes as a real terrorist — and so are unlikely to show the same emotions. "I'm on the record opposed to that sort of testing," he says.

But without such data, how is anyone supposed to evaluate SPOT — or its training programmes? Those programmes are "not in the public scientific domain", says Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "As a scientist, I want to see peer-reviewed journal articles, so I can look at procedures and data and know what the training procedures involve, and what the results do show."

Carl Maccario, a TSA analyst who helped to create SPOT, defends the science of the programme, saying that the agency has drawn on a number of scientists who study behavioural cues. One he mentions is David Givens, director of the nonprofit Center for Nonverbal Studies in Spokane, Washington. Givens published a number of scholarly articles on nonverbal communications in the 1970s and 1980s, although by his own account he is no longer involved in academic research. His more recent publications include books such as Your Body at Work: A Guide to Sight-Reading the Body Language of Business, Bosses, and Boardrooms (2010). But Givens says that he has no idea which nonverbal indicators have been selected by the TSA for use in SPOT, nor has he ever been asked by the TSA to review their choices.

In the absence of testing, Maccario points to anecdotal incidents, such as the 2008 case of Kevin Brown, a Jamaican national who was picked out by behaviour-detection officers at Orlando International Airport in Florida and arrested with what they took to be the makings of a pipe bomb. Witnesses said that Brown was rocking back and forth and acting strangely, so it is hard to say whether specialized training was needed to spot his unusual behaviour. In any case, Brown successfully claimed that the 'pipe bomb' materials were actually fuel bottles, pleaded guilty to bringing a flammable substance onto an aircraft, and was released on three years' probation.

Arrest record

The TSA does track statistics. From the SPOT programme's first phase, from January 2006 through to November 2009, according to the agency, behaviour-detection officers referred more than 232,000 people for secondary screening, which involves closer inspection of bags and testing for explosives. The agency notes that the vast majority of those subjected to that extra inspection continued on their travels with no further delays. But 1,710 were arrested, which the TSA cites as evidence for the programme's effectiveness. Critics, however, note that these statistics mean that fewer than 1% of the referrals actually lead to an arrest, and those arrests are overwhelmingly for criminal activities, such as outstanding warrants, completely unrelated to terrorism.

According to the GAO, TSA officials are unsure whether "the SPOT program has ever resulted in the arrest of anyone who is a terrorist, or who was planning to engage in terrorist-related activity". The TSA has hired an independent contractor to assess SPOT. Ekman says he has been apprised of the initial findings, and that they look promising. But the results aren't expected until next year. "It'll be monumental either way," says Maccario.

SPOT was in its first full year of operation when the DHS science and technology directorate began to look at ways to move people through the screening points faster. One was Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), which is now being funded at around US$10 million a year. The idea is to have passengers walk through a portal as sensors remotely monitor their vital signs for 'malintent': a neologism meaning the intent or desire to cause harm.

Cameras (above) and sensors (inset) can measure subtle physiological changes to eye movement, pupil dilation, heart rate and respiration, among other things. 

FAST operates on much the same physical principle as the century-old polygraph, which seeks to reveal lies by measuring psychophysiological responses such as respiration, cardiac rate and electrical resistance of the skin while a subject is being asked a series of questions. The FAST portal would also look at visual signals such as blink rate and body movement — and would give up the polygraph's contact sensors in favour of stand-off sensors such as thermal cameras, which can measure subtle changes in facial temperature, and BioLIDAR, a laser radar that can measure heart rate and respiration.

Most of the FAST work, particularly the sensors, is contracted out to the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, an independent, not-for-profit, research centre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which has the goal of producing a prototype portal next year. The project is then scheduled to enter a second phase that will remove the questioning process altogether and instead try to induce a response in the subjects by using various stimuli such as sounds or pictures, possibly of a known terrorist. "In the laboratory now, we have a success detection rate [percentage] of malintent or not malintent, in the mid-70s," says Robert Burns, the DHS programme manager for FAST. "That's significantly better than chance or what the trained people can do."

Robert Burns explaining the Future Attribute Screening Technology, which measures nonverbal cues. 

Those results have not yet been published, but Burns says that the FAST programme sets great store on peer review and publication, and that three papers are currently in the process of review. But FAST's critics maintain that the malintent theory and FAST both suffer from some of the same scientific flaws as SPOT. Flying is stressful: people worry about missing flights, they fight with their spouses and they worry about terrorism. All of these stresses heighten the emotions that would be monitored by the FAST sensors, but may have nothing to do with deception, let alone malintent. "To say that the observation is due to intent to do something wrong, illegal or cause harm, is leaping at the Moon," says Raskin.

The malintent theory underlying FAST is the creation of Daniel Martin, who is the director of research for FAST, and his wife, Jennifer Martin. Both are psychologists, and Daniel Martin, who is on the faculty of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has in the past focused primarily on the area of substance abuse. Daniel Martin says that at the time he and his wife developed the malintent theory, "there was minimal published work available that specifically tested whether physiological, behavioural, and paralinguistic cues could detect malintent in a realistic applied research study". He says that they have had to develop their own laboratory protocols to carry out those tests. Martin and his colleagues have just published what they say is the first peer-reviewed study to look specifically at the links between psychophysiological indicators and intent. The study looks at 40 native Arabic-speaking men and finds a connection between intent to deceive and a heart-rate variation known as respiratory sinus arrhythmia.

"I have not come out and said, 'We have found the answer'," Martin adds. "We are pursuing the answer, we're not sure yet. We have years yet to go."

The lack of answers has not stopped aviation-security programmes from moving forwards with deception detection. Maccario points to the UK pilot scheme, now in its first year at Heathrow Airport. He says that the programme, like SPOT, uses specially trained behaviour-detection officers, and "their initial results are very successful". Earlier this year, the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity announced its own plans to study "defining, understanding, and ultimately detecting valid, reliable signatures of trust in humans". And about two years ago, the Pentagon asked JASON to look at the field.

"As we dug in, we found it was very hard to subject the research to the kinds of standard we're used to in the physical sciences," says JASON head Roy Schwitters, a physics professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In fact, the executive summary of the JASON report, The Quest for Truth: Deception and Intent Detection, which was provided to Nature by the Pentagon, criticizes many of the allegedly successful results from deception-detection techniques as being post-hoc identifications. One problem, the study found, was that the reported success rates often included drug smugglers, warrant violators and other criminals, not covert combatants or suicide bombers who might not have the same motivations or emotional responses.

Sallie Keller, dean of engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and the head of the JASON study, said that it seemed that those involved in the field were trying to get their work peer reviewed. But doing research — even if it is properly peer reviewed — doesn't mean the technology is ready to be used in an airport. "The scientific community thinks that it is extremely important to go through the process of scientific verification, before rolling something out as a practice that people trust," she says.

 

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Researchers involved in the field suggest a number of research avenues that could be more fruitful for counter-terrorism. Aldert Vrij, a social psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, UK, says that structured interviews may offer the best credibility-assessment research. Nonverbal cues might play a part in this process, he says, but you need to actively interview a person. For example, his work shows that subjects were able to give more reasons for supporting an opinion that they believed than if they were acting as a devil's advocate and feigning support. He suggests that such an approach could have helped to determine the beliefs of the Jordanian suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees in Afghanistan after being taken into their confidence.

Although Israeli aviation security uses interview-intensive screening, it's not clear how practical such an interview method would be at busy airport checkpoints, which have to screen hundreds or thousands of passengers every hour. The guards would still need some way to choose who to interview, or no one would ever get on a plane. This is the seductive appeal of programmes such as SPOT and FAST.

But, to Honts, the decade since the 11 September attacks has been one of lost opportunity. Calling SPOT an "abject failure", he says that the government would have done better to invest first in basic science, experimentally establishing how people with malintent think and respond during screenings. That work, in turn, could have laid a more solid foundation for effective detection methods.

Granted, Honts says, that measured approach would have been slow, but it would have been a better investment than rushing to build hardware first, or implementing programmes before they have been tested. "We spent all this time, and all this money," he says, "and nothing has been accomplished."

via:wired

After US Airways flight 1549 emergency landed in New York’s Hudson River last January, citizen journalism provided the first on-the-scene reporting, thanks to Janis Krums’ infamous Twitpic of the crash.

More citizen journalism from David Martin resulted in the following time-lapse video embedded below, of the Airbus A320 aircraft submerged in the Hudson’s icy waters and eventually extricated by crane. It’s a strangely captivating book end to the crash landing, which thankfully saw all 155 passengers safely rescued by nearby watercraft.

After its chilly rescue, the Airbus A320 actually went on the auction block. It’s listed “as is,” so if you’re hankering for a salvaged aircraft sans engines, wings on the side, get on down to Kearny, New Jersey to claim your insanely large souvenir.

The Obama administration's plan to protect air travelers from terrorists is counting on a technology that is powerful but imperfect, experts say.

The plan will place hundreds of full-body scanners in airports around the country. These scanners use a technology called backscatter X-ray to create images that can reveal weapons or explosives hidden beneath a person’s clothing.

But they don't detect everything, and they won't be in every airport.

President Obama announced the wide deployment of these scanners two weeks after a Nigerian man allegedly tried to blow up an airplane using plastic explosives concealed in his underwear on Christmas Day.

X-Rays Penetrate Clothing

The scanners use X-rays, but they're not like the X-ray machines you see in a doctor's office.

Medical X-rays are powerful enough to pass all the way through your body. The airport machines rely on a much weaker beam, says Steven Smith, an electrical engineer.

Smith designed one of the first backscatter X-ray scanners 20 years ago. These days, he runs Spectrum San Diego, an electronic imaging company.

The backscatter machines use X-rays that penetrate through clothing and about an inch into a person's body, "where they ricochet or backscatter back in the same direction they came from," Smith says.

A sort of digital camera captures these reflected rays.

Backscatter X-ray devices are safe because they expose people to an insignificant amount of radiation, Smith says. But he says the images they produce can look a lot like a nude photograph.

"It shows everything under your clothing," he says. "And if you had something within a few millimeters of your skin's surface, it would show that also."

The government plans to use software that makes the images in airports less graphic.

Prisons have been using the backscatter technology for many years to find knives, guns and contraband, even though the machines cost more than $150,000 apiece.

More recently, the U.S. military has used the scanners in Iraq to protect bases there from terrorists.

"In general, body scanners are able to give you the same degree of detection capability as frisking someone would," Smith says. "But it is far less invasive."

Scanners Could Miss Some Contraband

Smith, a former police officer, says he doesn't want to talk about what the scanners might not find. He says that could help terrorists.

Other experts, though, say backscatter scanners would probably miss a weapon or explosive concealed in a body cavity.

And that apparent weakness has provided an opportunity for an Indiana company called Nesch LLC, which is developing another low-dose X-ray device that can find contraband where other scanners can't.

This machine is called DEXI, for Diffraction Enhanced X-Ray Imaging.

"To my knowledge it's the only one that very reliably can detect the presence of such substances, explosives or illegal substances that are hidden inside of a human body," says Ivan Nesch, the company's president and CEO.

'The Last Line Of Defense'

So can any of this X-ray technology really make air travel safer?

"Of course not," says security consultant Bruce Schneier. "It's sort of magical thinking."

Schneier sees a couple of big problems with the government's strategy.

First, he says, every technology has its limits. And he's not reassured by the government's new scanner.

"It doesn't detect low-density explosives," Schneier says. "It doesn't detect explosives that are thin. You know, it's really very limited as to what it detects. It may or may not have detected the underwear bomber. We don't actually know."

Another problem, he says, is that even hundreds of scanners won't be enough to protect every airport.

"The 9/11 terrorists didn't go through security in Boston," he says. "They went through security in places like Maine."

And once a terrorist has made it through security anywhere in the system, they're not screened again, Schneier says.

"So unless these machines are in every airport in the country," he says, "all we're doing is making the terrorists take another flight before they launch their attack."

The government's real problem isn't a lack of technology, Schneier says. It's a tendency to react to what has already happened, not what might happen next time.

"Airports are the last line of defense, and they're not a very good one," Schneier says.

He says taxpayers would get more for their money if the government invested less in hardware and more in investigations of potential terrorists and better intelligence.

The “underpants bomber” has renewed calls for new and more invasive security measures. Already, there’s a push to install scanners that show travelers’ naked bodies through clothing, using either millimeter wave or backscatter X-ray imaging. But even those scanners might not have caught the terrorist who nearly brought down Northwest flight 253.

That’s why one company is trumpeting a sensor that can supposedly “detect substances such as explosive materials … hidden inside or outside of the human body.” First step: Actually build a human-sized machine.

There has already been one report of a suicide bomber carrying explosives internally. Many sources, including the BBC, carried an early report suggesting that Abdullah Hassan Al Aseeri adopted the new tactic of “carrying explosives in his anal cavity” for an attack in September. The target, a Saudi prince, survived, but Aseeri was reportedly blown in half by the blast. Later reports suggest the explosives were actually sewn into his underwear, but security experts believe there is a real danger of “internally carried” bombs,  a technique used for years by drug smugglers.

Nesch, a company based in Crown Point, Indiana, may have a solution. It’s called diffraction-enhanced X-ray imaging or DEXI, which employs proprietary diffraction enhanced imaging and multiple image radiography (.pdf).

Rather than simply shining X-rays through the subject and looking at the amount that passes through (like a conventional X-ray machine), DEXI analyzes the X-rays that are scattered or refracted by soft tissue or other low-density material. Conventional X-rays show little more than the skeleton, but the new technique can reveal far more, which makes it useful for both medical and security applications.

“Our patented technology can detect substances such as explosive materials, narcotics, and low-density plastics hidden inside or outside of the human body,” company CEO Ivan Nesch claims. DEXI allows explosives to create contrast, he adds, so it would be able to detect both the underpants bomber and the shoe bomber before they boarded.

The image above shows how a conventional radiograph does not detect two packets of “illegal materials” concealed in soft tissue, while they are plainly visible in when DEXI technology is used.

The process of taking the images, analyzing them, and then recognizing substances of interest — such as explosives — can be automated. Alerts issued can be computer-generated. Security staff would simply have to get passengers in and out of the imaging unit.

“The initial expected throughput is approximately one to two passengers a minute,” according to Nesch. “Once installed and tested in real applications, the throughput will be increased.”

Nesch has already demonstrated the technology with a unit originally designed for imaging small animals. The next stage is a human-sized unit, which is being “finalized for extensive testing.” Nesch plans to start taking orders for the new unit in March this year.

Of course, X-ray scanners always bring up a concern over the level of radiation involved. One of Nesch’s corporate slogans is “Less radiation, more information,” as DEXI uses significantly less radiation than other approaches.

“It is far less than what a passenger would receive simply by flying on an airplane across the United States,” says Nesch. “Passengers who are imaged using DEXI security will be exposed to approximately 50 times less radiation than that of a conventional radiograph. ”

There is likely to be a ready market for the new technology. Although an X-ray might be seen as more intrusive than an image of the outside of your body, it may be less controversial. In Britain, plans for “naked body” scanners may run into trouble because they break British child pornography laws: Creating “indecent” images of children is illegal. Those scans may also offend the modesty of some Muslims.

DEXI may be able to see into your body cavities, but it may be less obnoxious than some of the alternatives.

Via Flying with Fish

27/12/2009 – TSA Security Directive SD-1544-09-06 : The Fallout From NW253

Following the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack on Delta Air Lines Flight 253, operated by Northwest Airlines, from Amsterdam to Detroit, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has created a series of security measures in reaction to the incident.

Earlier today I wrote about Flight NW253 here, 27/12/2009 - Northwest Airlines Flight 253 : Myths & Facts.

The following is the complete text of the US DHS security directive as implemented by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

I post this text with no commentary or opinion; it is posted in its entirety as fact for you to better understand what is currently occurring in the realm of international aviation security.

Happy Flying & remember to use the lavatory 61 minutes prior to arrival in the US from overseas

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
Transportation Security Administration

Aviation Security Directive

Subject: Security Directive
Number: SD 1544-09-06
Date: December 25, 2009

EXPIRATION: 0200Z on December 30, 2009

This Security Directive (SD) must be implemented immediately. The measures contained in this SD are in addition to all other SDs currently in effect for your operations.

INFORMATION: On December 25, 2009, a terrorist attack was attempted against a flight traveling to the United States. TSA has identified security measures to be implemented by airports, aircraft operators, and foreign air carriers to mitigate potential threats to flights.

APPLICABILITY: THIS SD APPLIES TO AIRCRAFT OPERATORS THAT CARRY OUT A SECURITY PROGRAM REGULATED UNDER 49 CODE OF FEDERAL REGULATIONS (CFR)1544.101(a).

ACTIONS REQUIRED: If you conduct scheduled and/or public charter flight operations under a Full Program under 49 CFR 1544.101(a) departing from any foreign location to the United States (including its territories and possessions), you must immediately implement all measures in this SD for each such flight.

1. BOARDING GATE

1. The aircraft operator or authorized air carrier representative must ensure all passengers are screened at the boarding gate during the boarding process using the following procedures. These procedures are in addition to the screening of all passengers at the screening checkpoint.

1. Perform thorough pat-down of all passengers at boarding gate prior to boarding, concentrating on upper legs and torso.
2. Physically inspect 100 percent of all passenger accessible property at the boarding gate prior to boarding, with focus on syringes being transported along with powders and/or liquids.
3. Ensure the liquids, aerosols, and gels restrictions are strictly adhered to in accordance with SD 1544-06-02E.

2. During the boarding process, the air carrier may exempt passengers who are Heads of State or Heads of Government from the measures outlined in Section I.A. of this SD, including the following who are traveling with the Head of State or Head of Government:

1. Spouse and children, or
2. One other individual (chosen by the Head of State or Head of Government)

3. For the purposes of Section I.B., the following definitions apply:

1. Head of State: An individual serving as the chief public representative of a monarchic or republican nation-state, federation, commonwealth, or any other political state (for example, King, Queen, and President).

2. Head of Government: The chief officer of the executive branch of a government presiding over a cabinet (for example, Prime Minister, Premier, President, and Monarch).

2. IN FLIGHT

1. During flight, the aircraft operator must ensure that the following procedures are followed:

1. Passengers must remain in seats beginning 1 hour prior to arrival at destination.
2. Passenger access to carry-on baggage is prohibited beginning 1 hour prior to arrival at destination.
3. Disable aircraft-integrated passenger communications systems and services (phone, internet access services, live television programming, global positioning systems) prior to boarding and during all phases of flight.
4. While over U.S. airspace, flight crew may not make any announcement to passengers concerning flight path or position over cities or landmarks.
5. Passengers may not have any blankets, pillows, or personal belongings on the lap beginning 1 hour prior to arrival at destination.

AIRCRAFT OPERATOR ACKNOWLEDGMENT: The aircraft operator must immediately provide written confirmation to its assigned PSI indicating receipt of this SD.

AIRCRAFT OPERATOR dissemination required: The aircraft operator must immediately pass the information and directives set forth in this SD to all stations affected, and provide written confirmation to its PSI, indicating that all stations affected have acknowledged receipt of the information and directives set forth in this SD. The aircraft operator must disseminate this information to its senior management personnel, ground security coordinators, and supervisory security personnel at all affected locations. All aircraft operator personnel implementing this SD must be briefed by the aircraft operator on its content and the restrictions governing dissemination. No other dissemination may be made without prior approval of the Assistant Secretary for the Transportation Security Administration. Unauthorized dissemination of this document or information contained herein is prohibited by 49 CFR Part 1520 (see 69 Fed. Reg. 28066 (May 18, 2004).

APPROVAL OF ALTERNATIVE MEASURES: With respect to the provisions of this SD, as stated in 49 CFR 1544.305(d), the aircraft operator may submit in writing to its PSI proposed alternative measures and the basis for submitting the alternative measures for approval by the Assistant Administrator for Transportation Sector Network Management. The aircraft operator must immediately notify its PSI whenever any procedure in this SD cannot be carried out by a government authority charged with performing security procedures.

FOR TSA ACTION ONLY: The TSA must issue this SD immediately to the corporate security element of all affected U.S. aircraft operators.

FOR STATE DEPARTMENT: Retransmittal to appropriate foreign posts is authorized. Post must refer to STATE 162917, 201826Z Sep 01, Subject: FAA Security Directives and Information Circulars: Definitions and Handling, for specific guidance and dissemination.

Gale Rossides
Acting Administrator

Via Wired

TSA Special Agent John Enright, left, speaks to Steven Frischling outside the blogger's home in Niantic, Connecticut, after returning Frischling's laptop Wednesday.

Two bloggers received home visits from Transportation Security Administration agents Tuesday after they published a new TSA directive that revises screening procedures and puts new restrictions on passengers in the wake of a recent bombing attempt by the so-called underwear bomber.

Special agents from the TSA’s Office of Inspection interrogated two U.S. bloggers, one of them an established travel columnist, and served them each with a civil subpoena demanding information on the anonymous source that provided the TSA document.

The document, which the two bloggers published within minutes of each other Dec. 27, was sent by TSA to airlines and airports around the world and described temporary new requirements for screening passengers through Dec. 30, including conducting “pat-downs” of legs and torsos. The document, which was not classified, was posted by numerous bloggers. Information from it was also published on some airline websites.

“They’re saying it’s a security document but it was sent to every airport and airline,” says

Steven Frischling, one of the bloggers. “It was sent to Islamabad, to Riyadh and to Nigeria. So they’re looking for information about a security document sent to 10,000-plus people internationally. You can’t have a right to expect privacy after that.”

Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Suzanne Trevino said in a statement that security directives “are not for public disclosure.”

“TSA’s Office of Inspections is currently investigating how the recent Security Directives were acquired and published by parties who should not have been privy to this information,” the statement said.

Frischling, a freelance travel writer and photographer in Connecticut who writes a blog for the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, said the two agents who visited him arrived around 7 p.m. Tuesday, were armed and threatened him with a criminal search warrant if he didn’t provide the name of his source. They also threatened to get him fired from his KLM job and indicated they could get him designated a security risk, which would make it difficult for him to travel and do his job.

“They were indicating there would be significant ramifications if I didn’t cooperate,” said Frischling, who was home alone with his three children when the agents arrived. “It’s not hard to intimidate someone when they’re holding a 3-year-old [child] in their hands. My wife works at night. I go to jail, and my kids are here with nobody.”

Frischling, who described some of the details of the visit on his personal blog, told Threat Level that the two agents drove to his house in Connecticut from DHS offices in Massachusetts and New Jersey and didn’t mention a subpoena until an hour into their visit.

“They came to the door and immediately were asking, ‘Who gave you this document?, Why did you publish the document?’ and ‘I don’t think you know how much trouble you’re in.’ It was very much a hardball tactic,” he says.

When they pulled a subpoena from their briefcase and told him he was legally required to provide the information they requested, he said he needed to contact a lawyer. The agents said they’d sit outside his house until he gave them the information they wanted.

Frischling says he received the document anonymously from someone using a Gmail account and determined, after speaking with an attorney, that he might as well cooperate with the agents since he had little information about the source and there was no federal shield law to protect him.

The Gmail address consisted of the name “Mike,” followed by random numbers and letters. Frischling had already deleted the e-mail after publishing the document but said he had learned from previous correspondence with the source that he had been hired as a screener for the TSA in 2009.

The agents searched through Frischling’s BlackBerry and iPhone and questioned him about a number of phone numbers and messages in the devices. One number listed in his phone under “ICEMOM” was a quick dial to his mother, in case of emergency. The agents misunderstood the acronym and became suspicious that it was code for his anonymous source and asked if his source worked for ICE — the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The agents then said they wanted to take an image of his hard drive. Frischling said they had to go to WalMart to buy a hard drive, but when they returned were unable to get it to work. Frischling said the keyboard on his laptop was no longer working after they tried to copy his files. The agents left around 11 p.m. but came back Wednesday morning and, with Frischling’s consent, seized his laptop, which they promised to return after copying the hard drive.

Frischling wrote on his blog that he decided to publish the TSA directive to clear up much of the confusion and speculation that was circulating among the public about changes that were being instituted in airport security procedures after a passenger unsuccessfully tried to ignite a bomb Dec. 25 using a syringe and explosive chemicals hidden in his underwear.

“We are a free society, knowledge is power and informing the masses allows for public conversation and collective understanding,” Frischling wrote on his blog. “You can agree or disagree, but you need information to know if you want to agree or disagree. My goal is to inform and help people better understand what is happening, as well as allow them to form their own opinions.”

A former federal prosecutor who asked not to be identified told Threat Level that the TSA is being heavy-handed in how it’s handling the matter.

“It strikes me that someone at TSA is apoplectic that somehow there’s a sense that they’re not doing their job right,” he told Threat level. “To go into this one reporter’s house and copy his computer files and threaten him, it strikes me that they’re more aggressive with this reporter than with the guy who got on this flight.”

Christopher Elliott, who is based in Florida and writes a column for the Washington Post, MSNBC and others, received a visit from a TSA special agent named Robert Flaherty around 6:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Elliott wouldn’t discuss the details of the visit with Threat Level, due to pending legal issues, but he describes in his blog post how he got a knock on his door shortly after finishing dinner and putting his three young children in the bathtub.

Flaherty showed him a badge and said he wanted information about the source of the document he published. When Elliott told him he’d need to see a subpoena, Flaherty pulled one out and handed it to Elliott.

Elliott told Threat Level they talked for 10 to 20 minutes, but he refused to cooperate. Flaherty left but called Wednesday to remind Elliott that he had until the end of the business day to comply with the subpoena.

“I really don’t think they thought this one through,” said Elliott about the TSA tactics.

Elliott could face a fine and up to a year in jail for failure to comply, according to a statement on the subpoena.

The TSA directive was issued Christmas Day, the date of the attempted attack on Northwest Flight 253, and indicates that the directive will expire Dec. 30. The directive applies to anyone operating a scheduled or charter flight departing from a foreign location and destined for the United States.

It requires all passengers to undergo a “thorough pat-down,” which should concentrate on their upper legs and torso, at the boarding gate. It also requires physical inspection of all “accessible property” accompanying passengers at the boarding gate, “with focus on syringes being transported along with powders and/or liquids.” It also indicates that restrictions against liquids, aerosols and gels should be strictly adhered to. Heads of state can be exempted from the special screening.

Passengers are also required to remain seated during the last hour of flights, and cannot access carry-on baggage or have blankets, pillows or other personal belongings on their lap during this time.

Aircraft phones, internet service, TV programming and global positioning systems are to be disabled prior to boarding and during all phases of flight. Flight crews are also prohibited from making any announcements to passengers about the flight path or the plane’s position over cities or landmarks.

The TSA was embarrassed earlier this month after a contract worker posted an improperly redacted sensitive screening manual on a government site.

That document revealed which passengers are more likely to be targeted for secondary screening, who is exempt from screening, TSA procedures for screening foreign dignitaries and CIA-escorted passengers, and extensive instructions for calibrating Siemens walk-through metal detectors.

Five TSA workers were put on leave pending an internal investigation into how that document got posted