Op-Ed: O'Hare Added to List of Airports Using Thought Police

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George Orwell may have been a bit early in his predictions, but his book 1984 outlined in eerie detail what people might expect from overreaching governments. If you thought being detained for facecrime could never happen in America, guess again.

O’Hare International in Chicago has now been added to the list of more than forty airports that utilize hundreds of “behavior detection officers” according to the Chicago Tribune. The program is known as SPOT, which stands for Screening Passengers by Observation Technique.

How catchy.

Psychology techniques are used to determine if a passenger has the potential to be dangerous. Psychology is not a hard science, and therefore risk assessment tools based on it are by nature merely speculative.

Douglas Laird, former director of security for Northwest Airlines and current consultant in aviation security, helped develop the Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPS for short. He is unsure of SPOT’s potential for success and has concerns about over reaching. Civil libertarians as well as others agree.

CAPPS boasts more success than the current program has thus far. It targeted 10 of the terrorists who attacked on September 11, 2001 for further scrutiny. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to stop them. Still, that program actually produced some results that have the potential for further development and fine-tuning, yet it was halted after people complained about profiling.

Yet, the thought police option is somehow better?

If complaining was enough to shut down CAPPS then Americans better getting busy complaining and working to wipe out this big, dark SPOT on our personal liberties.

While the facecrime program boasts hundreds of arrests, of the cases claimed to be successes, none were terror related.

"I am not sure that the purpose of the TSA is to identify the guy who has not paid his child support,” the Chicago Tribune quoted Laird as saying.

No, Mr. Laird, the Transportation Security Administration should certainly not be made into a group of government watchers in the hope of catching the occasional dead-beat dad. This program is clearly being used against citizens, instead of the proper process for criminal activity, and instead of focusing on terrorism.

The Fourth Amendment is clear:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

It says nothing about detaining people for sweating, appearing nervous, or contorting their facial features. How can a person prove he or she was not having bad thoughts? More accurately, how can someone prove he or she did not appear to be having bad thoughts?

American citizens are clearly finding themselves under their government’s suspicion more and more and such a program is far too easy to abuse. There seem to be few protections in place to make sure that doesn’t happen, and they’re certainly not the protections contained in the Bill of Rights.

Who’s monitoring the monitors?