In an effort to make its security screenings more effective — the agency has yet to catch an honest-to-goodness terrorist — the TSA implemented a behavioral profiling system called SPOT. The idea is to train agents to recognize certain "suspicious" behaviors to prevent an attack.
Formalized in 2007, SPOT has come at a price tag of $1 billion, but a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) alleges that the screening techniques are "discriminatory, ineffective, pseudo-scientific, and wasteful of taxpayer money."
A report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in November found that SPOT's success rate is only "the same as or slightly better than chance." And all of this may be irrelevant anyway, as the TSA itself admitted in 2013 that terrorists have moved on from airplanes.
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