[iwar] [fc:Body-Language.Study.Is.the.Latest.Weapon.In.U.S..War.on.Terror]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-08-26 21:21:02
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Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2002 21:21:02 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Body-Language.Study.Is.the.Latest.Weapon.In.U.S..War.on.Terror]
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Body-Language Study Is the Latest Weapon In U.S. War on Terror --- FBI,
Customs Agents Are Taking `Nonverbal Behavior' More Seriously --- Bomber
Arrest Was `Wake-Up Call'

By Ann Davis, Joseph Pereira and William M. Bulkeley
2,508 words
19 August 2002
The Asian Wall Street Journal
A1
English
(Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones &amp; Company, Inc.)

NEW YORK -- A few weeks ago, U.S. Customs Service inspectors at John F.
Kennedy International Airport were carefully watching hundreds of passengers
coming off a flight from South America, looking for telltale body language
that would indicate exceptional nervousness.

They quickly focused on one man because his lips were so chapped and dry
they were almost white, and "his carotid artery was jumping out of his
neck," says supervising inspector Vincent Digilio.

After questioning the man, Mr. Digilio and another inspector discovered he
had paid cash for a business-class ticket, even though he was a low-paid
service worker. They X-rayed him and found he had swallowed several bags of
heroin pellets.

Body language used to be something teenagers studied on first dates. But in
the wake of Sept. 11, the science of spotting nervous or threatening
behavior is gaining newfound respect among law-enforcement officials,
particularly as a way to prevent terrorism.

Since the terror attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has started
teaching nonverbal behavior analysis to all recruits. At the Customs
Service, which has been asking agents to step up their use of so-called
behavior profiling since 1999, in part to combat accusations of racial
profiling, all agents now are being required to watch a video teaching them
techniques for studying body language.

Rather than selecting people to be interrogated based on what they look
like, Customs agents have been trained to watch what they do and ask pointed
questions to increase their stress levels.

During interrogation, instead of just listening for inconsistencies in what
is said, agents are being taught to look for minute physical reactions on
the faces of people being questioned. For example, fleeting smiles may
indicate "duping delight," when a suspect believes he has put something over
on a questioner.

"Terrorists behave differently than legitimate people," says Rafi Ron, an
Israeli security consultant, who contends that well-trained body-language
profilers might have spotted and questioned some of the Sept. 11 hijackers
"by very basic behavior-pattern-recognition work."

Mr. Ron now is overseeing a project at Boston's Logan International Airport
to train more than 200 Massachusetts state troopers, beginning this month,
to watch for things such as darting eyes and hand tremors and to conduct
rapid-fire questioning to find inconsistent stories. Other airports in the
U.S. could soon follow. The federal Transportation Security Administration,
which is taking control of airport security, has requested that some federal
passenger screeners receive training on spotting suspicious behavior,
according to security consultants vying for the work.

To augment human spotters, some security experts envision enlisting
computers. Systems under development could watch security cameras and spot
people running or lurking in deserted corridors. A New York company founded
by Israeli intelligence veterans, Secant Aviation Security Inc., is
developing software that automates behavior analysis through such tools as
hidden voice-stress sensors. They would be set up at various airport
locations such as check-in desks. A unit of SRI International Inc., Sarnoff
Corp., developed a program that will show the path that every individual
follows as he walks through a building.

Security experts say the result will be safer airports and public places.
Many point to the Israeli airline El Al's reliance on behavior surveillance.
It pioneered observation of behavior and body language in the 1970s. It also
hasn't had a hijacking in more than 30 years.

Americans and others are likely to find themselves subjected to a new level
of public scrutiny. It may become normal to be stared at or questioned by
officials looking for nervous or distracted behavior, and secretly examined
by video and voice monitors.

The shift raises the specter of anxious travelers coming under suspicion
when they are just nervous about flying. So "a very high degree of training"
of those doing the body-language monitoring is "the only way to make a
system like this work," says David Harris, a law professor at the University
of Toledo College of Law.

Civil libertarians worry that authorizing police to act based on observation
of legal but suspicious activities will give them license to harass people
who are minding their own business. "Police have said `let us use our
judgment,' but we, as a freedom-loving society, have said `that's way too
much discretion to give to law enforcement,' " says Frederick Lawrence, a
Boston University law professor. "We may not have to wait too long for that
first lawsuit."

Some dispute the idea of accurate behavior analysis. Arvid Kappas, a
psychology lecturer at the University of Hull in the U.K. and student of
facial-activity research, contends that analysis of nonverbal behavior isn't
much more reliable than handwriting analysis or "reading bumps on people's
skulls."

People can be trained to act normally under even sharp questioning. Drug
couriers have been known to use tranquilizers to avoid acting nervous. "As
we develop these techniques and they become publicized, the enemy will
become aware of it and will develop countermeasures," says Jack Devine, a
former Central Intelligence Agency official who now heads a New York
investigative firm called the Arkin Group. "This is an age-old cycle."

U.S. customs officials say their experience shows that behavior profiling
can work. They overhauled their tactics after some Jamaican and Colombian
women were forced to take laxatives in unsuccessful efforts to discover
drugs. After Customs placed more emphasis on looking for suspicious behavior
and one-on-one questioning, the "hit rate" at which they found drugs during
passenger searches reached 23%, compared with 4.2% in 1998.

Body language and behavior led to one prominent terrorism-related arrest. In
late 1999, U.S. customs inspector Diana Dean was checking cars coming off a
ferry in Port Angeles, Washington, when she noticed Ahmed Ressam acting
oddly. He fiddled with the car's center console and failed to make eye
contact as she spoke to him. After she asked him to leave his car, Mr.
Ressam was found to be carrying a stack of bomb components. He later
confessed to planning to disrupt the millennium celebrations in Los Angeles.


"It was a wake-up call for us at Customs," Ms. Dean says. "When I look at
everybody now, I leave open the possibility that they could be a terrorist.
That's the way every inspector is being trained now."

Although defendants sometimes argue that searches based on behavior
profiling are invalid, U.S. courts generally uphold them, based on a 1968
Supreme Court ruling. In that case, an Ohio police detective stopped and
searched several youths walking back and forth outside a store "because they
didn't look right to me at the time." When he approached them to ask their
names, they "mumbled something." The youths, who proved to be armed and
planning a robbery, fought the arrests as based on an unreasonable search,
but the court said it was justified.

The term body language entered the popular vocabulary a quarter of a century
ago after research on benign behavior: courting rituals. Julius Fast wrote a
book called "Body Language" that became a bestseller. But "we've come a long
way from 1975," says Joe Navarro, an FBI special agent who lectures on the
subject. "We believe the study of nonverbal behavior has progressed to such
a degree that in capable hands, it is now more accurate than lie-detector
tests."

Much of the science was developed by Paul Ekman, a University of California
at San Francisco psychologist, who published in 1978 what he called the
Facial Action Coding System, or FACS. That standardized system has made it
possible for trained researchers around the world to analyze expressions in
the same way.

Dr. Ekman says the brains of all people are similarly wired to the muscles
under the skin of the face. Our lips get thinner when we are angry. Our
blink rate increases when we are nervous. Our eyes widen with excitement or
fear. Our nostrils flare when we are aroused, and blood flow increases,
reddening our skin when we are preparing for a fight, whether it is of a
physical or mental nature. It is hard to suppress these expressions, Dr.
Ekman maintains, because they emanate from areas of the brain that control
many of the involuntary muscles.

Dr. Ekman particularly focuses on what he calls micro-expressions, such as a
momentary downward twist of one end of the mouth demonstrating contempt, or
a quickly suppressed smile. He says such fleeting expressions take less than
0.2 seconds but involuntarily reveal the subjects' true emotion. Dr. Ekman
says that observers can be trained to spot these micro-expressions and tell
whether subjects are lying or hiding information.

While most of his work has been academic, he has trained Secret Service
agents, Israeli bodyguards and Scotland Yard detectives in scanning crowds
for people who might be dangerous. Last month, Dr. Ekman says, he received a
contract from the U.S. Defense Department to analyze videotapes of 250
convicted criminals and their accomplices, including some involved in
terrorism. He will try to identify facial expressions that indicate disdain.


"These people have nothing but contempt for the people they are about to
prey on," Dr. Ekman says, adding that he will "be looking to detect any
signs of such feelings and sentiments."

Schools that train law-enforcement officers have borrowed heavily from
facial and body-language studies since Dr. Ekman's initial work.
Instructional materials from John E. Reid &amp; Associates Inc., of Chicago,
which operates one of the oldest interview and interrogation training
programs, say an untruthful person is "more likely to engage in grooming
gestures or major body movements as tension relievers when answering key
questions." Postures that suggest someone might be lying include slouching,
turning away or making erratic posture changes. Avoiding eye contact often
suggests untruthfulness, although, for example, some Asian women often avoid
eye contact with men as a cultural norm.

It was body language that helped the FBI's Mr. Navarro solve the case of a
missing child in August 1999. A 22-year-old woman had FBI agents and local
sheriff deputies looking for her six-month-old son, who she said had been
kidnapped in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in Florida. As the sobbing woman,
Christa Decker, told her story inside police headquarters, Mr. Navarro
observed through a one-way mirror.

Following the interview, Mr. Navarro told sheriff's investigators that he
didn't believe her story; her demeanor was too subdued. "When people tell
the truth, they make every effort to ensure that you understand them. They
gesticulate with their arms and face, they're expressive," he says. Liars
are more interested in keeping their facts straight, an effort that forces
them to be calm and composed. Ms. Decker was called back for a second
interview, during which she confessed she had suffocated the child by
putting him inside a plastic garbage bag.

This spring, in a symposium for Florida police at St. Leo College, Mr.
Navarro demonstrated the techniques. He randomly picked police officer
Michael Kitts and asked him to pretend he had just murdered someone, keeping
in mind the weapon he used. Then, staring him in the eye, Mr. Navarro
recited a list of possible weapons: machete, gun, bat, knife, stick,
boulder, rock. Mr. Kitts remained stone-faced.

"You chose a knife didn't you?" Mr. Navarro asked.

"Yes," said Mr. Kitts.

Though Mr. Kitts had remained poker-faced, his blink-rate increased and he
swallowed hard at the mention of a knife, Mr. Navarro says.

Behavior-profiling techniques also have become more elaborate outside of law
enforcement. In Las Vegas casinos, where video cameras are everywhere,
behavior analysis sometimes pinpoints a person about to commit a crime.

In late July, surveillance officers at the Venetian spotted a pony-tailed
man who walked in at 2:13 a.m. and grabbed a stack of plastic coin-cups but
didn't go to the slot machines. "Why would he get cups if he isn't playing?"
Daniel Eitnier, the surveillance director, remembers thinking. From that
moment, "this guy looks like he's got a purpose to be here but it's not
gambling." The man confirmed the suspicions by "rubbernecking": looking
right and left and peering at guards and the ceiling instead of at other
gamblers and machines.

At 2:16 a.m., the surveillance officers followed him to a slot machine where
a partner had previously broken the lock. The man shoved his hand down into
the machine and drew out fistfuls of coins. A few seconds later, he got up
to leave and security guards tackled him.

For terrorism experts, the challenge remains figuring out how such
techniques can be used to survey large crowds instead of just a suspect in
an interrogation session. That is where some experts hope automation will
come in.

The CIA has commissioned two research centers, the Salk Institute and
Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, to attempt to teach
computers to watch for detailed facial-language clues. Both prototypes have
been completed and are being reviewed for accuracy and potential
applications.

Terrence Sejnowski, a researcher at Salk Institute in California, says
analyzing a minute of an interview can take a trained observer an hour, but
a computer might handle the process in real time. Dr. Sejnowski is applying
for grants to turn his research prototype into a commercial system to
observe psychiatric patients. He is less eager to see it used in security,
fearing it "could be misused."

Secant Aviation aims to computerize the Israeli airline's method of
passenger screening. The New York company is creating software it says would
mirror the "El Al protocol" by helping analyze how large numbers of people
behave as they go through an airport. It would automate much of the
analysis, using hidden surveillance technology, and allow screeners to check
off any suspicious behavior they see.

The idea is for the computer to collect data on passengers at various points
from curbside check-in to flight gates. For example, baggage handlers might
flag for further observation a woman wearing sloppy clothes but checking
Louis Vuitton bags. If the system also detected nervousness in her voice
when she went through security, and if other risk factors were present in
her background, it might trigger an alert to security people to pull her
aside for questioning.

Sarnoff, of New Jersey, has developed computer programs that take
information from hundreds of cameras around a building and create "tracks"
showing where each person has been. The firm says it could be useful in
airports to spot people slipping in through exit doors.

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