Airport Security by Israeli Rafi Ron ¶ IDF – Neal Sher & Burson-Marsteller

Minneapolis and Boston airport uses it

Update Dec. 3, 2005 — Minneapolis is the second large airport in the country where TSA screeners have begun testing the new surveillance system, called Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT, Welna said.

SPOT is based on a profiling system at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Rafi Ron, a former Israeli airport security expert, helped design the program in 2002 and his consulting company – New Age Security Solutions (NASS) – in McLean, Virginia, began training Minneapolis-St. Paul airport police in October 2004.

Police here have assigned teams to use the techniques on a “random basis” since then, airport police Lt. Shawn Chamberlain said. He said he’s unaware of any potential terrorists who have been snared, but said the system improves police work.

Rafi Ron could not be reached for comment. But in 2002, he told a congressional subcommittee that screening technology at security checkpoints is flawed. It can’t catch every potential weapon, he said, and manual searches are too intrusive and take too long.

Screeners should focus on those people most likely to cause problems, he said. Passenger profiling methods have been used successfully for three decades in Israel, he noted.

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Security Training at Statue of Liberty Conducted by NASS

NEW YORK – July 7, 2005 — “Mass transportation systems will always be vulnerable to some extent if we want to keep them as efficient as they are today.”
Rafi Ron – Transportation Security Consultant

NEW YORK July 23, 2005 — Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents 35,000 New York City transit workers, said the training fell short of what’s needed. Tomorrow, the union will offer its members terrorism awareness and deterrence training by Rafi Ron, the chairman of New Age Security Solutions and the former head of security at Ben Gurion International Airport in Israel.

Statement by Rafi Ron to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs – September 21, 2005.