TSA Changing Techniques, Still Politically Correct

The TSA will soon be announcing a new program for screening airline passengers, this time based on "behavior". I was hoping that "behavior" would be a politically correct euphemism for "profiling", but such is not the case:

In the four years since it was created, the Transportation Security Administration has been trying - and often failing - to find dangerous things that passengers might bring onto an aircraft. Now the TSA is aiming to become less obsessed with scissors and cigarette lighters and focusing more on passenger behavior. Government sources tell TIME that the agency will announce in the next few weeks that it will introduce a race-neutral profiling program at the country's busiest airports, among them New York's John F. Kennedy, Los Angeles International and Chicago's O'Hare. The program has an awkward title, Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques, but a clever acronym, SPOT. It has been tested over the last three years at several airports in the northeast, including Boston's Logan Airport, where two of the 9/11 hijacking teams launched their operations.

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Here's how it works: Select TSA employees will be trained to identify suspicious individuals who raise red flags by exhibiting unusual or anxious behavior, which can be as simple as changes in mannerisms, excessive sweating on a cool day, or changes in the pitch of a person's voice. Racial or ethnic factors are not a criterion for singling out people, TSA officials say.

Stop right there. Why not consider racial or ethnic factors? How many blonde Norwegians were involved with 9/11 or are thought to be involved with Al-Qaida? How about blue-eyed Swedes? Why can't we look a little harder at Middle Eastern men between 18 & 30? As a nation, we've become so scared of hurting someone's feelings or possibly being accused of racism, that we've allowed all common sense to flee.

And look at this example of why the new SPOT program is needed:

The SPOT program comes none too soon, since the current TSA system of screening for threats on airplanes has been, well, spotty. Earlier this month TSA screeners not trained in the SPOT program pulled over three Marines in dress uniform for special screening. After being patted down and scrutinized closely, the Marines were finally let go and allowed to continue their duties - escorting the body of one of their colleagues killed in Iraq.

You mean to tell me that it takes special training to know better than to suspect uniformed Marines as potential terrorists? Maybe John Murtha thinks all Marines are killers, but most sane people don't have too much to fear from our own armed forces.

I don't expect that there will be much improvement to the safety of airline passengers