TSA is now also watching your weight

Secret program treats average folks like terrorists

If you fall asleep or use the bathroom during your next flight, those incriminating facts could be added to your federal dossier. If you fidget, sweat or have “strong body odor” — BOOM! the feds are onto you. Welcome to the latest profiling idiocy from the Transportation Security Administration. Its “Quiet Skies” surveillance program is spurring air marshals to target dozens of Americans each day on the flimsiest of pretexts. The secret program, exposed by Jana Winter in The Boston Globe, is security theater at its best.

What does it take to become a Quiet Skies target? “The criteria for surveillance appear fluid. Internal agency emails show some confusion about the program’s parameters and implementation,” The Globe noted.

Anyone who has recently traveled to Turkey can apparently be put on the list — as well as people “possibly affiliated” with someone on the biggest terrorist watchlist (which contains more than a million names). The program is so slipshod that it has targeted at least one airline flight attendant and a federal law enforcement agent.

After a person makes the Quiet Skies list, a TSA team is placed on his next flight. Marshals receive “a file containing a photo and basic information” and note whether the suspect’s “appearance was different from information provided” — such as whether he has “gained weight,” is “balding” or “graying,” has a beard or “visible tattoos.”

TSA marshals follow travelers targeted by this program, even writing down their license plates. Marshals must ascertain whether a “subject was abnormally aware of surroundings.” Does that include noticing the undercover G-men stalking them in the parking lot? No wonder the president of the Air Marshal Association, John Casaretti, considers the program unjustified.

Americans have no idea how many other secret profiling programs TSA is conducting. The New York Times recently revealed that TSA has a covert watchlist for troublesome passengers, including anyone whose behavior is “offensive” to TSA agents. Anyone who “loitered” near a checkpoint could make that list, as could any woman who pushes a screener’s groping hands away from her breasts.

TSA’s prior secret profiles have spurred agents to target legions of innocents and disrupt their travel. Thousands of TSA behavior detection officers have lurked in airports, seeking to detect would-be terrorists by their yawning or hand-wringing. A list of terrorist warning signs included anyone who expresses “excessive complaints about the (TSA) screening process.”

More than 30 TSA agents complained in 2012 that the behavior-detection program at Boston’s Logan International Airport had become “a magnet for racial profiling, targeting not only Middle Easterners but also blacks, Hispanics and other minorities,” The Times reported. In Honolulu, TSA agents were nicknamed “Mexicutioners,” while TSA agents in Newark, New Jersey, were derided as “Mexican hunters” by their colleagues.

The Government Accountability Office walloped the Behavior Detection Program last year, scoffing at the notion that TSA agents could spot terrorists by “assessing the way an individual swallows or evaluating the degree to which an individual’s eyes are open.”

TSA insisted the program was justified because agents watched for “unusual exposed wires or electrical switches on a person” boarding a plane.

TSA assumes would-be terrorists are as boneheaded as policymakers.

Unfortunately, few people in official Washington are willing to recognize or admit TSA’s most absurd terrorist profile: the assumption that average Americans are so perilous that they must forfeit their privacy and dignity at checkpoints. To justify its $7.9 billion budget and its 43,000 federal screeners waiting to peruse shoes, belts and carry-on snacks, TSA must continue the fable that every grandmother in a wheelchair and every child poses a dire threat that justifies endless pawing.

After nearly 17 years of follies and floundering, TSA has forfeited its right to domineer the American people.

James Bovard, author of Attention Deficit Democracy, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.