The Woeful TSA Doesn't Need More Staff. It Needs This Tech

Incorporating the latest technology and a better understanding of human behavior could eliminate the worst parts of passing through airport security.
Denver International Airport After Blizzard
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American airport security has never been something to look forward to, but in the past few weeks, it's attained new levels of misery. The busy summer travel season is only just starting, and already the public's been warned to expect the worst. Understaffed Transport Security Administration checkpoints mean lines spilling out of airport doors.

Hauled before Congress for a ritual grilling, TSA chief Peter Neffenger pledged to increase staffing (including sniffer dogs) and encourage more people to enroll in the TSA Pre-Check program, in which trusted travelers (who've undergone background checks and paid a fee) pass through a quicker, less rigorous screening. He sacked his head of security. Those steps may fix the immediate problem---those godawful lines---but won't get to the core of what's wrong with US airport security.

The TSA can’t seem to find the balance between convenience and security. Even when the line moves smoothly, the process feels invasive, ad hoc, and simultaneously ineffective: Screeners seem to constantly fail tests to find fake explosives or weapons.

A new approach, incorporating the latest technology and a better understanding of human behavior, could eliminate all that, and make the experience much smoother. Researchers are designing and testing systems that would let you stroll through airports without ever having to stop, and yet still be scanned and checked en route to your gate---perhaps without even realizing it.

“The problem is that from day one [the TSA has] adopted the wrong approach,” says Rafi Sela, CEO of AR Challenges, an international transportation security consultancy. Sela believes the Department of Homeland Security took the wrong approach when it created the TSA, after the September 11, 2001 attacks. (The TSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The idea of checking every single person and bag, once they’re in the airport, just can’t work much longer, Sela says. “If you build your building on the wrong foundations, it will never be right.” Sela's no novice here: He helped write the regulations for the Israeli Security Agency at Ben Gurion Airport, widely viewed as one of the most secure in the world.

Technology could be used to at least shore up those foundations. The Awareness and Localization of Explosives-Related Threats (ALERT) Center at Northeastern University is a Department of Homeland Security "Center of Excellence" (a swanky name for funded R&D centers) that is looking into the future of security checkpoints, and it's got some intriguing ideas. Those include making checkpoints painless---maybe even invisible---and new video recognition techniques to spot and track suspicious behavior.

“Our vision for a 2020 checkpoint is to triple the current rate of scanning,” says researcher Jose Martinez Lorenzo, from 100 people per line, per hour, to 300. Better yet, in his vision, passengers won’t even have to break stride, offer up their tiny shampoo bottles, or dig out their computers. They will walk through an arch or a tunnel at normal pace, and be scanned in real time.

It's not as futuristic as it sounds. Martinez-Lorenzo wants to use a souped-up version of the millimeter wave scanners that nowadays do body scans in airports. Right now, processing a scan takes at least two seconds. Martinez-Lorenzo is developing high capacity systems to process more images, faster, in a similar way to how video compression software works. It should work in real time, like a moving image rather than a set of stills.

“We have developed many of those components in the lab,” he says. “We have good preliminary results. Now we are trying to assemble everything together.” The 2020 timeframe could be accelerated with more resources, he says.

Northeastern University

In 2014, Northeastern researchers trialled a video recognition system at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. A human operator can struggle to monitor multiple cameras trying to pick out one person doing something he shouldn’t, particularly in a crowd. The Video Analytic Surveillance Transition (VAST) project spotted 99 percent of violations, with only five false alarms per week. A system like this could be installed at exit doors---the ones that say "no turning back beyond this point"---to spot people doing just that. It could also lock onto an individual and track them through a crowd, across multiple cameras.

These technological innovations are useful, but should be viewed as supplements, not replacements for people, Sela argues. “This is something we’ve been using for years now,” he says of Israeli security, “but it is just a tool to make life easier, not a solution.”

He advocates for a radical new approach security in the US and Europe, one more in line with the Israeli style. There, the perimeter of Ben Gurion's airfield in Tel Aviv is secured by several rings of highly trained officers, both overt and concealed, along with cameras, license plate scanners, and just about anything else you can think of. Every car and every passenger must pass through several layers of screening before they even get near the check-in hall, and most of that screening is behavioral or psychological. “We don’t need to look at luggage if we have looked at people,” says Sela.

That “looking” involves exhaustive questions about travel plans, backgrounds, and luggage. Officers may not even listen to the answers, but watch the demeanor of the person answering. Their nervousness could just mean a fear of flying, but could also indicate nefarious intentions. Either way, a person who sweats under the pressure of a few questions is sent for a second round of screening, and perhaps more after that. Passengers at Ben Gurion still put their hand luggage through an x-ray machine, but Sela says this is to stay in line with International Civil Aviation Organization rules. He’s so confident in the prior screening, he'd happily see them removed.

Northeastern University

But the full scale overhaul of US airport security Sela calls for isn't going to happen. The buildings were designed and located before 9/11, without perimeter security in mind. And anyone who has actually travelled through Ben Gurion knows it can be a long, slow experience---one that also raises concerns about privacy and profiling.

So the road to a better TSA may lie somewhere in between, in a combination of new technology and old-school behavioral analysis, by using computers to assist with the screening. Artificial intelligence is becoming more useful for pattern recognition, which means it could be used to highlight people acting suspiciously, or passengers with "tells" showing how nervous they are. Again, that could mean they’re having an emotional reunion, or that they’re carrying a weapon. Either way, they could be flagged for a checking by a human.

“Combining information from different sources will help improve the overall performance of the security system,” says Martinez-Lorenzo. “It will enhance the probability of detection and reduce false alarms.”

In the meantime, if you’re traveling this weekend there is one piece of technology that you should check out. The TSA website allows travelers to report their wait times at various airports, so you can go and online and check queue times. It may not get you through faster, but at least you’ll know in advance how much your journey is going to suck---before you climb into that middle seat.