By Calvin Biesecker
As more detection technologies populate an airport, in particular the security checkpoint, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is likely to begin seeking for these systems to become more integrated to increase their detection capabilities and lower false alarms, an aviation security expert and former agency official said recently.
The deployment of Advanced Technology X-ray systems, Advanced Imaging Technology for personnel screening, bottled liquid scanners and other technologies at the checkpoint, all of which are currently standalone systems, shows that the “elements are coming together for technology integration,” Dr. Rodger Dickey, an aviation security consultant and the former program director for the Security Technology Deployment Office at TSA, said in a recent aviation security webinar hosted by our sister publication Defense Daily.
To achieve this integration the government will have to issue standards that guide industry in creating integrated solutions, Dickey said. Those standards didn’t exist several years ago when General Electric [GE] introduced a kiosk for the Registered Traveler program that integrated quadrupole resonance technology for screening shoes, trace detection technology to screen a person for explosives residue, and biometrics to identify an individual.
TSA never approved the GE kiosk but Dickey commended the company for making the effort, adding “that’s the kind of thinking that needs to occur.”
“But as the government develops, tests and promulgates these standards, I believe that you’ll see industry respond by integrating these orthogonal technologies,” Dickey said.
Dickey calls his concept for more integrated solutions “dynamic screening,” which also entails a “layered, risk informed security system” that incorporates technology, policy and procedures “all adaptively scaled and arrayed to defeat a given threat.” For example, a person may get more or less screening based on what may be known or observed regarding the individual.
“In other words you could, based on your Secure Flight score or observations of behavioral officers that are walking in a terminal, the degree to which you are screened by certain technologies can be decided essentially on the fly so that someone determined to be a higher risk could receive a higher level of scrutiny,” he said. “In any case, you would be able to go through merged sensors that provide high detection and low false positives.”
Despite his past service with TSA and before that the Federal Aviation Administration, Dickey points out that the end state he envisions is his, although he believes it “will track well with some of my former colleagues at TSA.” He also believes that it’s achievable by 2020.
The information technology backbone to dynamic screening will likely be the Security Technology Integrated Program (STIP), which was launched in 2006 to create an enterprise link between X-ray machines at the checkpoints of some of the nation’s airports to centrally monitor performance and maintenance needs. The initial STIP effort demonstrated that the concept is valid and that data can be processed in real-time or after to provide greater situational awareness for aviation security authorities, Dickey said.
Now TSA has a second STIP initiative underway. STIP is the “basic networking of information that can be brought together where Transportation Security Officers can have great situational awareness than they have right now by looking at an individual screen for one technology,” Dickey said.
“I believe that you’ll start seeing more information sharing with integrated communications sooner rather than later as a function of security technology integration,” Dickey said.
Dickey also believes that STIP, combined with changes ongoing at TSA and even the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, will enable a more open architecture and modular approach to aviation security.
“In the future you may see a vendor that provides a tremendous hardware platform, extremely robust, extremely flexible, and you may see another vendor provide software,” he said.