Israel's national airline, El Al, is often said to have most terrorist-resistant air fleet in the world. On El Al, security is built into every design element of the airplane: Cockpit doors are (and have long been) locked, armed agents fly on every flight, passenger luggage is thoroughly inspected (by hand and by machine), and the planes are fitted with antimissile systems. El Al also makes extensive use of profiling. The airline checks passenger identities in criminal databases, and agents are trained to ask all passengers questions about their flight. Travelers who appear especially nervous -- or who are Arab; El Al admits to using ethnicity as a factor in its security decisions -- are singled out for much tougher questioning, and the airline routinely bars people from flying.

But for both practical and obvious political reasons, El Al's approach to profiling turns out to be a bad model for the United States, security experts say. "U.S. airlines fly a lot more planes and a lot more passengers over much shorter routes," explains John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org. Each day, El Al has only a few flights, while thousands take off in the United States. And El Al is a long-haul airline, which makes profiling easier. "If you're going to sit on one of those airplanes for six or eight or 10 hours, you might not think that an elaborate, robust interview process and physical security check is out of the question," Pike says. Most American passengers, however, people whose flights typically last less than a couple of hours, would balk at such procedures. Indeed, Pike says, "the level of security they have right now is on the verge of altering travel patterns. For most passengers, the experience is unbearable. I no longer fly between Washington and New York -- I'll either take the train or drive, because the annoyance of having to park far away from the terminal and to go through the whole rigmarole, it's too much to bear."

Pike's point is key to understanding the federal government's desire for CAPPS II. The U.S. aviation industry is suffering a historic downturn, and at least part of the reason is the peculiar psychology of American travelers: People are both too afraid to fly and too annoyed to fly. Americans want their planes to be as secure as El Al's, but they don't want to face the hassles of El Al. CAPPS II has to be seen as an effort to fit that bill: a profiling system meant to be as rigorous as El Al's, but automated, hidden and a hassle to only some of the passengers.

Capt. Steve Luckey, the chairman of the Air Line Pilots Association's flight security committee and a proponent of CAPPS II, says that critics of the plan fail to grasp this idea: "They don't realize that this is actually protecting the individual rights of most people by minimizing the scrutiny." What he means is that once CAPPS II is implemented, the vast majority of people will have an easier time at airports than they do now. CAPPS II will concentrate security resources on the most likely terrorist threats, Luckey says. For instance, if the computer clears someone of any potential mischief, his bags don't need to be very extensively checked by hand or with slow, expensive computer-topography screening systems. And that's good for all of us, because "right now, good people are being scrutinized. The wrong people are paying for 9/11. We need to utilize the tools to work smart rather than work harder."

But from a security standpoint, Luckey's idea does not make very much sense, critics of CAPPS II say. If you do your profiling by computer, rather than by in-person interviews, you're bound to miss all sorts of clues that could lead you in the right direction, and you could give too much weight to other clues that could lead you astray. Scannell notes that Timothy McVeigh had an Army security clearance -- he would presumably have passed through CAPPS II with no trouble. Shelton, of the NAACP, says, "The fastest-growing religion in the African-American community is Islam, and when many people in the African-American community become Muslim they change their name to an Arab name. You see Leroy Jones who has now changed his name to Muhammad Ali. You see Susan Washington who has changed her name to Kadida Muhammad." Under CAPPS II, are all these African-Americans going to be subject to extra screening while the John Walker Lindhs of the world make it through just fine?

The TSA itself has rejected some forms of profiling in part because of this potential for missing key threats. Since 9/11, many pundits have criticized the department for hassling senior citizens and children at airports, people who, the pundits cry, are obviously no threat to U.S. national security. But the TSA routinely finds contraband hidden on kids and old people. On July 12 at Orlando International Airport, for instance, screeners found a loaded .22 handgun stuffed inside a 10-year-old boy's teddy bear. (The bear had been given to the boy by another boy a few days before the flight. After questioning the child and his family at the airport, the FBI allowed them all to board the plane.) TSA agents have found knives hidden in senior citizens' prosthetic legs and in baby car seats. According to the agency, since February 2002, it has caught "1,437 firearms, 2.3 million knives and 49,331 box cutters," and James Loy, the agency's director, has said that such items don't come only from people who fit what most would guess is the profile of a terrorist. "The suggestion that our screeners should pay less attention to grandmas and babies is like giving a free pass to terrorists," Loy said in a statement on July 18. (For pictures of items in which people have "artfully concealed" weapons, see this TSA gallery.)

Because the agency will still need to look closely at kids and grandmothers, not to mention everyone else, it's not clear that CAPPS II will decrease the scrutiny, and the hassle, most of us face at the airport -- yet it will certainly increase the scrutiny and hassle some of us face. Some number of these hits will be false positives; and even if it's a small rate, just 1 or 2 percent, that's still millions of people falsely identified as potential terrorists every year.

Given this difficulty of spotting terrorists, many critics of CAPPS II wonder why the TSA says that it wants to use the system not just for terrorism but also for other violent crimes. "If a person's not a terrorist and they just assault someone with a deadly weapon at a bar, I'm not worrying about them sitting next to me on the airplane," says Dempsey. "I don't think we should use the gate at the airplane to catch them. I think resources are being diverted from air safety. But there are clearly some in Homeland Security who want to make it a general all-purpose law-enforcement agency." A few of the critics of CAPPS II said they would be satisfied if the TSA made it clear that the system would be used only to make sure that a given passenger was not on a known terrorist watch list. "My view is that having a database that is comprised of terrorists and known associates of terrorists, and which is updated and based on sound intelligence, is not at all problematic," Barr says. It is worth noting that a system like this is currently in place, and was in place on 9/11 as well -- the only problem was that the watch lists didn't include the names of the known terrorists.

Because the problems with CAPPS II are so glaringly obvious, many critics seem confident that the proposal will have a hard time surviving without significant changes. A system called CAPPS II might eventually come into use, but if the public loudly objects, it won't be the system the TSA is now putting forward. Barr says that Americans have now started to see that the fight against terrorism is costing them civil rights, and he believes they're beginning to fight back. "I think the public is expressing their concerns to their members of Congress, and that's why we are starting to see Congress starting to wake up to these kinds of programs," he says. For example, on July 22, the House passed the Otter Amendment, which prohibits law enforcement agencies from engaging in "sneak and peek" activities -- surreptitiously searching the homes of suspected terrorists.

While there's no doubt that he's an ardent civil libertarian, Barr still seems somewhat reluctant to criticize the president. Asked if he believed that the White House, like the Congress, was starting to concern itself with privacy rights, he started to say, "They don't care at all," but then caught himself. "They don't seem to be focused on that at this point," he ended up saying. "The response by the Justice Department to the Otter Amendment a few weeks ago was, 'The sky is falling, the sky is falling, if this goes into law it will gut our war against terrorism.'"

But Barr believes that the administration may come around. "On the one hand it's a good sign that the attorney general felt the need to go on this whistle-stop tour defending the PATRIOT Act," Barr said. "At least they're feeling the heat to the extent that they think they need to defend themselves." But whether the pressure makes the White House enact real changes in its policies, Barr can't say. "If they don't, hopefully Congress will do its job."

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