IATA boss says passenger profiling needed as well as scanners
02.01.10
Full body scanners will not eliminate the terrorist threat to flying, the world's leading airlines have warned. The Telegraph reports that they are calling for extra security checks to be focused on groups of passengers perceived to present the greatest risk.
Giovanni Bisignani, director general of the International Air Transport Association, said that security can only be guaranteed by making a risk assessment of people before they are even board an aircraft. He said: ‘Instead of looking for bad things—nail clippers and rogue bottles of shampoo—security systems need to focus on finding bad people.'
The newspaper reports that airlines fear that over-reliance of scanners and pat down searches of all passengers could bring airports grinding to a halt and ‘waste resources’. Mr Bisignani said: ‘The air transport system cannot support 100% pat-down searches over the long term,’ and has urged Governments to combine hi-tech screening with intelligence about terrorist threats and evaluation of the risk posed by individual passengers, to pick out potential terrorists who would be subjected to more detailed searches.
He said: ‘Adding new hardware to an old system will not deliver the results we need. It is time for governments to invest in a process built around a check point of the future that combines the best of screening technology with the best of intelligence gathering. Such a system would give screeners access to important passenger data to make effective risk assessments.'
However, targeting travellers seen as a potential threat - known as passenger profiling - remains controversial, with some critics arguing that it is potentially racist with Asian and Arab travellers more likely to be picked out than others. But supporters of profiling say that techniques are more sophisticated and would include taking into account how tickets were bought – a cash purchase would trigger concern – previous travel and even behaviour at the airport itself.
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