Thursday, August 17 2006 12:11 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

New York: Taking a page from Israeli airport security, the US transportation agency is experimenting with a new squad whose members do not look for bombs, guns or knives but keep an eye on anyone with evil intent.

These specially trained officers are working in about a dozen airports nationwide and they represent just a tiny percentage of the transportation agency's 43,000 screeners.

But the New York Times quoted agency officials as saying that after the reported liquid bomb plot in Britain, they want to have hundreds of behaviour detection officers trained by the end of next year and deployed at most of the nation's biggest airports.

"The observation of human behavior is probably the hardest thing to detect," Waverly Cousin, a former police officer and checkpoint screener who is now the supervisor of the behavior detection unit at one of the airports was quoted as saying.

"You just don't know what I am going to see. Even in its infancy, the paper said, the programme has elicited some protests," he said.

At one airport, passengers singled out solely because of their behavior have at times been threatened with detention if they did not cooperate, raising constitutional issues that are already being argued in court.

Some civil liberties experts were quoted as saying that the programme, if not run properly, could turn into another version of racial profiling.