On the morning of September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people were killed in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. These attacks resulted in the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, designed to prevent similar attacks in the future, and was founded on November 19, 2001.
However, the TSA security devices and programs have been severely misused during its lifetime, and only abused the rights of those traveling and failed to achieve its intended goal. There are specific programs in which the TSA has created that has caused controversy against the administration. The one that has sparked the most moral debate is the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, otherwise known as the SPOT program.
The SPOT program was established in 2006, put into United States airports in 2007, and has done questionably nothing productive to thwart terrorist plots in its entire lifespan. The agents that are hired to train and practice under the SPOT program are known as Body Detection Officers (BDO), and they are trained to read micro-facial expressions from constituents in the airports to suspect deceptive behavior. This idea is based on a theory created by psychologist Paul Ekman from 1963 that hypothesized that humans can detect deception in other humans by micro-aggressions in a person's face. These are things like eye twitches, perspiration, rapidly looking around, and more. These BDO's will survey the open airport floors and stop people that look to be "risky and deceptive" and force them into additional screening, regardless of the situation. However, over time, these BDO's skewed the spectrum further, and instead of trying to thwart terrorism operations, they began looking for people of color, trying to stop illegal immigration. This led to many accusations of racial profiling, and questioning whether or not this program was beneficial.
In 2015 the American Civil Liberties Union sued the TSA for the SPOT program claiming the lack of scientific methodology cannot justify the wrongful acts it had been doing. After the lawsuit, the TSA released the 90 micro-aggression checklist of the acts BDO's look for while looking for potential threat, as well as their budget for the SPOT program, which is approximately 1 billion dollars.
The TSA attempts to commend the SPOT program, praising that they stop thousands of individuals every year, but the stats show things less commendable. Within the BDO's stops, 80% of those stopped for additional screening were minorities, and only 3% were arrested. These arrests typically stemmed from accidentally leaving a pocket knife in a jacket or aggression towards a BDO after their mistreatment towards the victim.
The Department of Homeland Security heavily criticized the TSA's performance within this program. In the media, we are constantly being turned to the long wait lines, and being fear mongered about terrorism. In order to thwart terrorism, shouldn't we be requiring the government to have more accountable programs to prevent a terrorist attack similar to 9\11? A program that doesn't oppress minorities and is actually effective at stopping negative forces and threats? This problem needs to be addressed further, and eliminate the SPOT program from its root. Racial profiling and hatred towards minorities is not a tactic to fight against terrorism, it is a tactic to make the United States weaker and less unified, making us the ultimate target.
Sandy Dahl, wife of pilot of Flight 93 (Jason Dahl), stated shortly after the attacks on September 11th, “If we learn nothing else from this tragedy, we learn that life is short and there is no time for hate.” We as the United States have blinded ourselves of the real problems in the domestic nation today and rather made irrational decisions that have destroyed much of the morals we were founded upon. Our fundamental human rights must be upheld.
