India is sprucing up its aviation security apparatus with a profiling upgrade, under which potential troublemakers will come under the scanner of aviation security authorities the moment their tickets are booked. The Centre will track air travel data and may look for unusual ticket purchases in a bid to keep a check on terror, senior government officials said.
Additionally, the passenger pre-screening system, which will be adopted soon, will run a criminal check and see whether a passenger’s name is in the terror blacklist.
Early tracking“There is a plan to put in place a passenger profiling system. Unlike in U.S., where passenger data is sent to security agencies 24 hours before the departure of a flight, here the profiling of passengers will begin the moment an air ticket is booked,” said a senior Civil Aviation Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The move is seen as part of India’s efforts at tightening security at airports given the global concerns after This year has seen heightened security at airports across the globe after Turkey’s Ataturk International Airport and the Brussels airport were bombed by suspected Islamic State militants. and this is a part of India’s efforts to tighten the security at its airports.
“Profiling will not be based on religion, caste or creed. The ticket booking history could be looked into to check whether the pattern of travel is suspicious,” said a senior Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) official. Security measures vary across airports with passengers’ hand luggage being checked only in the hand bags of passengers are checked at the security-frisking area much later inside the terminal building in India which however, severely restricts entry to the airports itself. However, only passengers are allowed to enter the airport building in India unlike In Europe and America anyone can walk up to the check-in point.
Recently, civil aviation secretary R.N. Choubey detailed the government’s steps for ‘tracking’ passengers. “We have systems in place so information keeps coming to us. We track people…they don’t know they are being tracked. We track a whole lot of things. I don’t want to alert anyone (but) the way we do checks is not random. There is a method behind it,” he said at an event, while replying to a question related to security-check of hand baggage later in the airport terminal building.
Privacy violatedAviation security experts were apprehensive of the government’s move to track passengers. “It is intrusive to a person’s privacy. Passenger profiling could lead to an innocent person being unnecessarily victimised. Secondly, in India there is a practice of exempting high-profile people from the system so if you start exempting them from profiling as well, the whole system will fail,” aviation safety consultant Mohan Ranganathan said.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA), that represents some 265 airlines across the world, in its report ‘ Checkpoint of the Future’ has advocated different levels of screening for passengers based on the level of risk associated with each one of them. It says passenger data can be used to do a ‘watch-list check’ along with examining previous history and travel patterns.
