Israel does a marvelous job of it by a brief interview of every passenger. It's a matter of how each person reacts to initial eye contact; with proper interrogation training, ill intent is obvious.
The TSA technique does everything but what works. Gross wholesale violations of multiple Constitutional rights doesn't work.
It´s just the security girl that checks your ticket before you go with your bags through the bag cleareance (that happens before you check in). If you don´t know what´s happening you don´t notice it.
In fact Ben Gurion airport has one of the fastest and least unpleasent security screening I´ve seen, while being at the same time maybe the most secure.
Security people is very pleasent, even when they stop you for questioning, they do it fast and in a polite way. They are proffesionals that have to deal with daily and real threats.
The most unpleasent airport security is the TSA and then the British, and it depends largely on the guy you meet at the filter. After the 9/11 the german airport security were very strict for a couple of years, now they seem to be back to normal, stricter rules but not offensive searches and that.
Edit: I stand corrected the British security is mostly Heathrow. I flew from Edimburgh this April and the security was mostly the same as the rest of europe.
Also I have improved the wording a bit.
The British at what airport? There is no singular organization who carries out the security, and different airports subcontract the work to different companies. In general, my experience in the UK has been comparable to the rest of Europe.
4 hour immigration lines at Heathrow are normal for the rest of Europe? Schiphol is about 30 minutes. I am never flying in to Heathrow again, if I can avoid it.
4 hour? Wow. Longest I've ever had at Heathrow Terminal 5 was 15 minutes or so (it's been a decade or more since I last went to any other Heathrow terminal) — and I fly through both there and Amsterdam a fair bit. Typically quicker than Amsterdam, in my experience.
What terminal do you fly into? T4 is quite bad since it seems to handle all the flights from Asia. It really was 4 hours, but this was also before the Olympics while they were also busy doing renovations. If you are European, the experience is obviously faster (different lines), though being American doesn't seem to help.
Schiphol was still 30+ minutes (was in line behind a flight from...Iran), but not incredibly annoying like London was.
Terminal 5, as I said — nowadays all BA flights go there, so there are flights from all over the world there (the distinction between the other terminals is basically that of airline, the fact a lot of Asian airlines happen to be in T4 is coincidence rather than explicit planning, AFAIK).
I am British — which helps somewhat — but I've known them to throw us on the back of the "All Passports" queue when it's been relatively busy, and never noticed it take any longer than otherwise. That all said, I more often than not pass through the passport control used for domestic transfers, rather than that for leaving the airport (though my experience is that that tends to have shorter queues than the one for transfers).
And no, I wouldn't expect being from the US to help, except for not requiring a visa.
> There's a difference in reaction between someone nervous of cops vs. someone about to die in the willful act of mass murder.
That's a pretty nuanced decision for the inspector to make. Polygraph machines and their operators routinely mess that one up.
I doubt that they themselves claim they can make that differentiation, and if they do so make that claim, I'd bet cash on it that it has been untested as far as accuracy regarding false positives.
Generally speaking, teaching 'technique' to a layman and expecting them to all be of equal caliber is just simply wrong.
True, but that's why they reportedly pay lots more than minimum wage, recruit carefully, and train heavily. And also profile the hell out of people.
The real difference is that it's only one airport. It would be very expensive and time-consuming to scale that up to secure every airport in the US.
Not much news about false positives for them makes it out, at least not in English-language media, but the worst I've heard of them doing is grilling suspicious people for a few hours.
Saying that there's a difference is a tautology. Of course there's a difference. There's also a difference between someone trying to decide between getting an apple or a blueberry danish.
The important bits are whether the difference is detectable in a manner that is convenient (putting each passenger through an MRI machine is out of the question), reliable (minimize false positives and false negatives), and so on. Just saying "there's a difference" adds no new information to the conversation unless you're able to expand on the quantifiable aspects of those differences.
The difference is that New York, in and of itself, has more airports than Israel. Israel also pays extremely handsomely for its security. We would have to massively increase the funding for the TSA to attract better people and give them more resources.
The TSA technique does everything but what works. Gross wholesale violations of multiple Constitutional rights doesn't work.