Pistole did not delve into great detail about the developing screening techniques, but he did say that they would essentially be a way for security officers to pre-screen passengers before they boarded a plane.

“We do use a one-size-fits-all approach, which I don’t think is either efficient or beneficial for the traveling public or for security,” said Pistole.

“So what I’d like to do is spend more time with those that we assess, based on all of the information available to us…either from intelligence or information that’s been volunteered to us by the passenger, or that we glean perhaps from a behavior detection officer noticing something suspicious about the person.”

“That’s where we’re moving to, and…I’m committed to doing something this year that would demonstrate the different paradigm for how we go about doing passenger screening, who we screen and how we screen.”

Pistole said that he was taking both privacy issues and civil liberty concerns into consideration as he was developing the screening methods, which would “use a risk-based approach and [take] more of what we know about the person, [do] some pre-screening basically, [for] a more identity-based screening, as opposed to the full physical screening.”
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