to check one two three four five six seven eight nine ten one two three four  already my apologies to the witnesses and to the audience we are holding for something that's happening on the floor right now and will be we'll be right back in a moment this hearing will now come to order good afternoon i'd like to welcome everybody to today's hearing on passenger screening research and development the attempted bombing on christmas day two thousand and nine flight revealed gaps in our current airport security measures we are grateful that this attempt was like several other prior plots unsuccessful at the same time these attacks have exposed vulnerabilities in current passenger screening technologies which must be addressed moving forward we have to make sure that department of homeland security research is actively closing the gaps in our capabilities producing security methods that the public will accept and increasing ability to keep americans safe in response to the failed christmas day attempt president obama called on the department of homeland security to work with the department of energy to develop and deploy the next generation of airport screening technologies the purpose of today's hearing is to learn how other federal agencies will respond to the president's challenge to develop improved screening technologies in addition i am deeply troubled by the lack of attention d h s s paid to the past in the past two important public acceptance issues in one nine hundred ninety seven about thirteen years ago the national academies of science has identified the need to pay more attention to public acceptance issues in the deployment of passenger screening technologies ten years later in two thousand and seven and i note that this is on either side of september eleventh the national academies concluded again that this is important and also concluded that nothing had changed and that these acceptance issues were still being ignored so it is little wonder that the deployment of body scanning technologies has proven to be such a dramatic public failure the relevant agencies did not do their homework and follow up on the academy's recommendation in a serious way two reports ten years apart both ignored therefore it concerns me that in the written testimony other than passing comments on the privacy aspects of deploying airport screening technologies the agencies before us today still do not have a robust and comprehensive plan for conducting and using effective public acceptance research nor do they seem to have a plan to allow for input from crucial state holders such as the public airport officials or the participating airlines i want to assure everyone in this room that i am committed to ensuring that legitimate public concerns are adequately addressed in the development of any next generation airport screening technologies of course the screening process must protect the public but it must be accepted by the public as well in order for it to work finally i look forward to hearing how honest and will work together to address technical standards accreditation and certification of these new technologies without these pieces in place new technologies cannot be deployed effectively i want to thank our witnesses for being here we plan to act on your information i now recognize ranking member and colleague mr smith for his opening statement thank you chairman woo and thank you to our witnesses today for for taking time for this hearing on developing and deploying the next generation of passenger screening technologies attempted christmas day bomb northwest airlines flight two fifty three was yet another reminder that al qaeda and its affiliates continue to pursue all means to attack innocent americans and that we must continue using all means available to us military intelligence and technological to remain ahead of this threat but also like to join the chairman welcoming today's distinguished panel at the forefront of this necessary research and i look forward to learning more about the ongoing research and expected developments in the field as well as a potential positive and negative implications of this work for all americans while it is vital we continue seeking the most effective technological means to ensure americans remain safe from attack we must ensure that new technologies don't needlessly intrude on passengers privacy there are more than seven hundred million airline passenger boardings in the in the united states every year and we must find the best possible means to ensure the interdiction of all those who would do us harm while continuing to protect the privacy of the vast majority who are obviously innocent one particular technology which has received widespread coverage in light of the christmas incident in which i have heard concerns from numerous constituents about his whole body scanners which allow airport screeners to see concealed contraband beneath passengers clothes while the desirability of this technology is understandable from a security standpoint learning how technological advances in other fields such as explosives detection and behavioral sciences will mitigate the need for intrusive scanners thank you again mr chairman i yield back the balance of my time thank you very much but if there are members who wish to submit additional opening statements your statements will be added to the record at this point at this point and now it is my pleasure to introduce our distinguished witnesses first mr brad buswell is the deputy undersecretary science and technology director at the department of homeland security doctor corsi is the program manager of the coordinated national security standards program at the national institute of standards and technology dr sandra hyland is the senior principal engineer at the systems and  albright for right now we're going to skip your introduction until governor garamendi can come by and for each of the witnesses you will have five minutes for your spoken testimony your written testimony will be included in the record in their entirety and when you complete your testimony we will begin with questions and each member will have five minutes to question the panel mr buswell please beg department today to discuss with you this critical issue of airport passenger screening technology i also want to thank the committee and the staff for your continuing support science and technology in our mission to to enable and deliver technology to protect the american people is charged with providing technical support and tools to the major d h as operating components in our nation's first responders all of whom are on the front lines of homeland security every day the d h s s and he funds basic research and technology development and supports the department's major acquisition through testing evaluation in the development of standards the transportation security administration has the lead role in d h s in defining the performance specifications of equipment that are installed at airports as part of the security measures d h s s and t and t s a coordinate closely on research efforts and equipment testing evaluation to ensure the department is investing in technologies that meet t s a is operational needs to protect the traveling public as you're aware mr chairman the department's research and development priorities are primarily driven through our capstone i p t process the customers and the stakeholders in this process play a lead role in informing science and technologies decisionmaking about research and development investments based on their desires our research priorities and aviation security have been and continue to be first to improve the capability of currently fielded screening equipment and procedures in the near term and in the longer term develop and deploy new equipment and procedures  to improve the security of air travel all three of the science and technology portfolios the product transition which is near term innovation portfolio which is led by the homeland security advanced research projects agency or a sharp and a basic research portfolio participate in the i p t process while the i p t members drive the selection of the transition products the near term needs the expressed needs that arise from this process also inform the selection of projects in our basic research laboratories for example is not new to us since its inception the h s has worked in close collaboration with the d o f national laboratories in the pursuit of technology supporting the operational needs of the department in response to the president's direction we've taken a number of actions one of which is to recently establish the department of homeland security department of energy aviation security enhancements partnership as an undersecretary level governance mechanism for managing the partnership between the h s and the d o d national laboratories specifically to advance technical solutions to key aviation security problems this governance will now us to extend leverage this long longstanding relationship with a focus on the utilization of the national laboratories to deliver key advanced aviation security technologies and knowledge  as you as you mentioned mr chairman development effective effective passenger screening technology must meet legal and regulatory requirements and take into account other constraints which could limit our ability to deploy it these constraints could include physical and performance constraints such as footprint  and throughput and also more subjective measurements as you mention such as public acceptance to that end we work closely with t s a and other d h offices such as the chief privacy office and office of civil rights and civil liberties to ensure the research we're doing has a clear path to deployment to mitigate the risk of excessive travel or resistance to screening technologies and to uses the community perceptions of technology panels that include informed experts from industry public interest and community oriented organizations to identify potential acceptance issues and i'd be delighted to discuss that more in the question and answer period if you have if you want to go into that further we also play an important role in the test and evaluation of equipment in advance of major acquisition decisions for aviation security technologies this  led by the transportation security laboratory and in atlantic city t s l t s all conducts independent verification validation tests and and depending on the maturity of the type of detection equipment does either certification qualification or laboratory assessments  finally we're about standards as you said mr corsi representing nist here he also happens to work on the same floor that i do in science and technology as he's been detailed to us to make sure we have a close cooperation with nist for a number of years and he's forgotten more about standards and i'll ever know so i will leave the standards discussion to him except to say that we work closely and we guide the national institute of standards and technology standards development for aviation security within the government we're working with that with the technology support working group the department of defense department of justice we have academia engaged through our university based centers of excellence we're engaged with industry have a broad agency announcement out to solicit technological solutions solutions for countering this and other threats across the broad spectrum of homeland security and additionally we are engaged whether international partners to ensure that we're capturing the best technologies possible and also to help them improve their security capabilities so in closing thank you for your dedicated efforts to improve the r i don't know they have the sense of timing but good fortune i finished my work on the floor and was able to get her to introduce mr albright i've never ceased to be amazed at all the things that are done at our national laboratories in particular the most important of all national laboratories the one in my district lawrence livermore national lab every time i delved into that lab i find some fascinating new things that are going on and things that are very very important dr albright is really into something that is important all of us  he is the principal associate director for global security at the lab he's responsible for applying the labs multidisciplinary science technology to anticipate innovate and deliver responsive solutions to our nation's complex global national homeland and energy security challenges which is a complex way of saying he's going to make sure we're prepared and in that context he comes with extraordinary background both in the public sector as well as in the private sector in the private sector with us group and organization that kind of put these pieces together in the private side and matching innovation with needs and the money to make it all happen and he was also the assistant secretary in the department of homeland security where he achieved several remarkable goals most important of which was he took the budget from seven hundred million to one point six billion we're ready to learn from you how we might do it in the context of today's hearing in any case we now move on to his testimony and the work that's being done and i look forward to hearing that welcome thank you very much and i do want to testify at this important hearing today on research and development activities aimed at improving aviation security let me make one quick comment about about mr garamendi he may not know that i just became a constituent only two months ago and so  director for global security at lawrence livermore labs one of the national laboratories that is managed by n s a within department of energy we do an awful lot of work on aviation security written large but what i'm going to focus my comments on today specifically are those efforts associated with passenger screening at the checkpoint the n s a laboratories have long been and continue to be fully committed to contributing their capabilities and systems analysis explosives high performance computing and other resources to work with the department of homeland security and other partner agencies to protect aviation and combat terrorist threats in fact it was a recognition of the particular capabilities of the department of energy national laboratories that specific language was inserted in language so anyway on an explosive this is actually a very very hard problem current events show that explosives continue to be the weapon of choice for terrorists worldwide the threat is evolving the internet has provided the terrorists with information to manufacture homeland it's homemade explosives using readily available chemicals they're also very very very difficult to detect in some cases billions of grams are available or what's available for sampling and it must be detected in the presence of other potentially confusing but benign materials t s a officers only have a short time to detect explosives and assess the situation before the allow the passage of people that they're to maintain the flow of people and goods so concentrated research  and continuous research and development is fundamental to understanding a threat and creating the tools that will give our nation the capability to include to decrease our vulnerability the technical capabilities of the national laboratories and very important status as federally funded research and development centers which brings with it unquestioned objectivity and independence and unfettered access to government data and proprietary information for example airframe structural data from the airframe manufacturers like boeing and airbus is crucial to improving the security of aviation body and a necessary enduring focus to this problem so the national labs have been involved in high explosive research development since the very beginning most of you in this committee don't need to be educated on the high explosives plays in the design and testing of nuclear weapons and so we have now over time and for a long time been applying that expertise to the needs of the department of energy of course the defense department the department of justice the f a a and most recently the department of homeland security so we with the laboratories combine cutting edge complete cutting edge computer simulation codes state of the art diagnostics and an environment where both your right of theoretical and experimental chemists the physicists engineers materials scientists can work together to provide a detailed understanding of the science of energetic materials their effect on aircraft structures their impact on existing detection systems at the passenger checkpoint and how systems might improve be improved security as part of that effort that a part of homeland security says brought together the three in an essay lab sandia los alamos and livermore in two thousand and six to create a program called the national explosives engineering sciences and security  program which capitalize on the f already seen model utilizing the expertise of those labs to develop and implement cutting age cutting edge engineering and science based methods that reducing the risk to aviation that effort has included the evaluation characterization of explosive formulations the assessment of catastrophic damage rapid assessment of technical and for four months of emerging detection systems in their applications or future efforts including more substantial effort to perform systems analysis of aviation security to include both the peep who would do us harm what their vulnerabilities are trying to exploit and the means by which they conduct the attack and under the president's initiative near term improve threat is enduring smart and adaptive to what we do the n s a the laboratories have extensive experience in conducting the kind of analysis needed to reduce our vulnerabilities and we are committed to working closely with the d h s s with nist and with our partners  across the federal government to to mitigate that threat thank you for this opportunity to appear before you today and we please answer any questions you might have thank you very much dr albright dr please proceed five minutes chairman ranking member coordinated way with the help address critical challenges and multiple areas relevant to homeland security today will focus my remarks on average relevant to passenger screening technology let me quickly highlight the work that  in relevant to passenger screening in the following areas additional information about each of these is contained in my written statement is involved in measurement standards in the following areas of detection of detection nine's for explosive detection  and effectiveness of current systems as well as support the development of next generation detection technology this work is also providing valuable tools in the form of training methods that allow them to optimize the  the performance of metal detectors both the handheld and the walk through using this facility develop rigorous and exacting performance standards for the handheld and for the walk through metal detectors for the national institute of assessment of millimeter wave and terahertz technology for detection identification concealed explosives and weapons technology more commonly known as full body or whole body scanners the n r c the national research council is the operating arm of the national academy of sciences the national  of engineering and the institute of medicine of the national academy of chartered by congress an eight hundred sixty three to advise the government on matters of science and technology i would like to clarify that i am not representing my employer be a systems but i'm here to discuss work i've done as an employee and a volunteer with the n r c over the past sixteen years the f a a and following nine eleven the t s a have sponsored numerous n r c studies on various aspects of aviation security in order to obtain expert independent guidance on technology priorities and approaches and we are pleased to continue this positive relationship my testimony today will center on the earlier reports in particular the committee's discussions related to implementation issues associated with new technologies the one thousand nine hundred six n r c report on airline passenger security screening ascribe not only the technical advances in security screening but also the more practical side of that screening is important to understand that no technology no matter how promising will work unless it can be successfully implemented within the aviation security infrastructure this in the committee addressed both the legal issues associated with passenger screening as well as the more difficult to quantify issue of public acceptance and although the report was written prior to nine eleven it is my opinion committee's message that it is important to assess the public's reaction to an acceptance of screening technologies remains relevant the committee reached its conclusions and developed its recommendations based on briefings from the f a a and other government entities on their security screening approaches and by holding a workshop attended by representative of groups such as airport personnel will be affected by changes in passenger screening approaches my written testimony includes a complete list of workshop attendees during the course of the study the committee held one underlying assumption the level of inconvenience an invasion of privacy that people are willing to tolerate is associated with their perception both of the severity of the threat and the effectiveness of the screening in averting that threat the one hundred ninety six committee identified four issues most relevant to the public acceptance of technologies health privacy convenience and comfort people differ in terms of the importance they place on these issues and their level of acceptance of past or screening technologies aside from considering the reactions of new technologies may elicit they will have to determine an acceptable level of opposition now briefly discuss the areas of concern identified by the committee health issues related to health are more related to the perception of health consequences than any actual risks specifically the committee noted the wall technologies were safe there are public concerns related to for example the potential consequences of exposure to the radiation used in scanning technologies it will be important then to be proactive in education relating to the minimal exposure levels and convey this information so that it is as accessible to a wide audience privacy privacy is probably the most significant factor in terms of whether the public will accept a new technology and in the case of the full body imagers described in the two thousand and seven report there are significant concerns as this technology can  a person's anatomical features as a committee noted in two thousand and seven a resolution of one centimeter the images have enough detail to be embarrassing to many people and can reveal such a personal information is easy enough to be a bag of the presence of breast implant it will be important then that if knowledge is adopted it is done in a way that it knowledge is the public's concerns about privacy and carefully balances them against the technology benefit in one thousand nine hundred six the committee noted that this technology would most likely only be accepted as a perceived threat level was high and the technology proven to be effective at averting the threat but that would be difficult to quantify just how high that threat would need to be in i pinion given the reaction to the attempted bombing of the northwest flight on christmas this may be the time to revisit the question the effect of this is of this technology in airport use and whether giving the threat the flying public would accept it in the ninety six report also identify steps that may improve public acceptance of body imaging technologies and trace explosive detection both of which are in my written testimony convenience is a largely a matter of time the current one thousand nine hundred six committee noted that screening technologies that impose delays will also have problems with public acceptance issues related to comfort arise when a technology requires the person being screened to be in close contact with either the equipment or another person or for technologies or acquires a person to be in a confined space while there are ways to minimize discomfort it can lead to a trade off a technological effectiveness for example using air flow to collect samples for explosive detection may ameliorate the concerns of a passenger that does not want to be touched but may not be as effective as direct contact nine hundred ninety six committee found that there's been very little study of the public acceptance of screening technologies and when this topic was revisited the committees work on whole body imagers in two thousand and seven that had not been that had not changed the committee identified a number of intangibles that go into the public's willingness to accept inconvenience and i've provided a description of those in my written testimony however the committee stated that there is no better way to gauge public acceptance of new technology screens than field tests the committee strongly encourage that in addition to performance data information related to the acceptance of this technology be collected people find it difficult to provide reactions to abstract hypothetical situations compared to here and now machines so the most accurate reading of the public's reaction to a scenario will be conducted by conducting testing as closely as possible to the proposed implementation i would like to conclude my remarks with some personal views based on the input from participants in the committee's workshop several representatives from airport operations in their care groups were concerned that the f a a would impose new screening technology without some consideration of passenger acceptance air carriers are acutely aware that travelers make trade offs and increasing to testify today and i'll be pleased to thank you very much dr highland and thank you for your contributions to the information gathered by this committee it is now in order to open for the our first round of questions two thousand and seven reports i want to ask the panel a threshold question of whether our concern about public acceptance is real or whether it's theoretical have you actually determined that the traveling public that is passengers at airports are actually concerned about the things that we think they're concerned about the reason why i'm saying this because i spent four hours knocking on doors into wallets in oregon this past saturday i got an earful but i think that the earful that i got in that neighborhood is very different from the air fall that i would get in another neighborhood in my congressional district choice of sample and what you ask is absolutely crucial are we speculating about passenger concern or do we have direct evidence that these are actual can cern's of the flying public whoever wants to go first thank you that's a question that the one thousand nine hundred sixty panel struggled with quite a bit we had experts in how people make decisions to do things they know are risky like smoking well they asked did they ask the traveling public what they thought in that case we recommended that the traveling public be asked but the question have they been asked not as far as i know but the most important town is filled with pollsters right i mean it's just filled with pollsters and i'm not necessarily recommending that but it seems like it's you know you don't go and sell cookies in the market without doing a focus group and sampling the public and so on and we're deploying of dollars of equipment we're betting lives on airplanes yes i like to have it have we polled have we asked the troops the traveling public have we actually asked the question i don't know i don't know i don't know either dr corsi i don't know either so we are sitting in this hearing room engaging in rank speculation about a problem which may not exist i mean you read about the newspaper but they're not citing their statistical evidence i asked this question to staff several days ago and i was shocked that they didn't have an answer and i'm even more shocked that you don't have an answer because you all are in charge of our national research effort and how do you know that we have a problem without having asked the question mr chairman if i may i think when it comes to public acceptance of these kinds of technologies aviation security passenger screening technologies being one example we have to assume why do you have to have a big because it's prudent to do so i mean look you can assume that the skies are blue you can assume the sun rises in the east but i think that mr smith and i would agree that it's dangerous to make very many assumptions and that a whole lot on that but if i may finish we have to assume that there could be public acceptance issues that well the question is why i mean what what makes it safe to make that assumption and it's a simple thing to ask the question i mean all you have to do is throw it in a battery of questions and then also ask the question have you flown in the last twelve months sure there are certainly and scientists guess the follow up question is how many times have you flown and then you do a simple read of  that it hasn't but i don't know that we haven't done it in s and t that i'm a lawyer you know as far as i know i'm the only person who asked that question thus far the staff was surprised and they didn't have an answer you all don't have an answer this is a really quick thing to do the follow up question is when are you going to get it done well i'll take that for actions or i mean let me let me go to give me a day to go to t s a and find out what they've done and then i'll get back to you with a with a specific date as to how we're how we're going to approach this they may have they may have data that i'm not aware of you know and what we do it's kind of a winner all kind of thing and you know so you live or die by the data that guy jeff and i'm not let necessarily recommending that anybody else live that way but the thing is that you all are engaged in a very very i'm a portent enterprise the public safety is at stake the whole economic sector the whole transportation sector is at stake and the trust of the public in what their own government does is at stake and you're telling me that one of the most to me one of the most fundamental questions to our collective knowledge has not been asked so i'm encouraging you in the strongest way possible to either find out that we have the data and get it here or to get that battery of questions asked and get it here and it shouldn't take very long because mr smith and i and every other elected up here knows that we can get an answer to questions like that by midnight tonight and have a rough analysis by eight a m tomorrow and have a thorough analysis within a day after that  that's the threshold question i'll get to the underlying question the next round mr smith you recognized five minutes thank you mr chairman several of you touched on the issue of passenger safety when interacting with the radiation emitted by screening technology technologies so knowing if you could address the radiation levels currently faced by airline passengers and whether and how much increase exposure they can expect in the future anyone wishing to respond sir i'd be pleased to to give you give you some numbers there and dr course he can pipe into because i know there are american national standards institute standards on the radiation exposure general radiation exposure from things like screening technology so to the extent that he wants to comment on that if he can let me put the let me put some things in perspective with regard to radiation doses to start with just so we are all sort of  calibrated and we're speaking the same because to me micro ram doesn't mean very much until unless you understand what you're talking about so a low dose dental x ray the dose that you get is about four million microgram or about four ram of exposure the average annual i grew up in colorado at the high altitude the average annual exposure that you get at high altitude from just from the sun really is about four thousand microgram so about one tenth of what a what a dental x ray would be in one hour on a commercial jet your dose is about one thousand micrograms in one screening by a backscatter x ray body scanner the dose is about six micrograms so in other words if you take a flight from new york to los angeles the dose that you receive would be about one thousand times what you would get while you're on the airplane compared to what you what you would get standing in the in the whole body imaging passenger federal guidance in this country for health effects comes from the national council on radiation protection and measurements and those of us in the federal agencies follow that this is not coming out of  today as we talk about knowledge is i appreciate fact that i read about mag is technology that was developed in national los alamos national laboratories discussed in a few of the testimonies and more than just objective for our work with homeland security is to get the department to establish a long standing running relationship between the n s c laboratories and the department science and tech directorate currently i think that you work with them from time to time when there is an issue specifically to identify such as if there's a terrorist threat that they may use liquid explosives on what will the damage be to the airplane as opposed to how can we make sure we're getting that molecular footprint so that way we can identify and prevent any liquids that even have a notion of being used to move forward in that way so so with that being said mr bush well although we are focused today on passenger screening i have been impressed with the briefings that receive from the scientists and researchers associated with the mag this technology proven technology that's already been demonstrated in a pilot your predecessor under secretary cohen saw the pilot demo at the and you know maggie is is one of those is one of those emerging success stories i think from our partnership with the national laboratories for those who aren't may not be familiar with the technology magnets is short for magnetic visibility and it's looking at the possibility of using technology similar to a hospital m r i machine to look for and not only find but identify liquids the difference would be the magnetic field and mag visit a much lower power which would allow operation without the restrictions and a high cost of traditional m r i as getting back to the footprint issue at the screening sites we as mr lawn said we demonstrated this technology it in albuquerque a year ago et into so now the next step in this risk management development is can we do that with entire tray size application if that's successful how how can can we be successful in doing  has great potential for success that we're looking for commercial partners at the end of the day the commercial partners are who you know who we need to get these things get these things deployed in mass so it's an excellent success story and recently established this it's off and running it's going to provide a senior level undersecretary level governance mechanism to focus the utilization of the national labs on this very important problem right now we're looking at three you can do all the governance you want but if you don't get down to the working groups and the people who actually know how to bring solutions to the table you're never going to get anywhere and we're looking at three areas to focus on one is as dr albright mentioned is the systems analysis of aviation security both from a aviation security as a system of systems and then from an engineering stand point when you get to the passenger screening checkpoint for example what's the what's the optimal configuration what are the tradeoffs among the among the chance to explore this a little bit for some of the questions but one thing that i just want to point out is one thing that we learned from the failed attempt on christmas day of this last year is that metal detectors didn't do the job  and there's been an investment in a commitment going forward with metal detectors we need to make sure that we're looking at these technologies to be able to identify these materials and to understand how we take into consideration the complexities associated with chemistry and the value of getting that molecular footprint so we can prevent them from getting from moving forward from identity identifying people that have them on their body on their persons or materials in a way that's very safe to mandate please proceed five minutes thank you very much was it twenty five thousand micrograms a year yes that's a thousand the flight across the country that's right we better stop going  in generality but do we really know how long do we have to wait what is the status or will it ever be possible the the thing that you walk through is looking for metals and that may have made a lot of sense in the day when we were worried about people bringing guns on board an aircraft but it doesn't check for explosives is just a fact of life even with the carry on carry on baggage systems that we have deployed without going into classified details they have they have utility in detecting explosives but they are certainly not at the performance point that i think anybody either or any of you or anybody here sitting at the table would would would like so we have tried to move on to other ideas whole body imaging is is certainly one that has has been put in play by the way as an aside one is that they are not volatile that means they don't put out a lot of vapor which is the kind of thing you would detect from in a remote environment you'd sniff for the for the explosive and they are not very volatile and frankly for obvious reasons you you would not want to have an explosive that rapidly turns into a vapor mixes with the atmosphere that would not be a very stable environment to operate in so they tend to have reloads very very hard to detect you have to actually detect the solid somehow and which is by the way the basis of those scanning systems that they use in secondary inspection the second difficulty is confuses you have a lot of if you many of you we have gone through a  a gun through secondary have been scanned to hide your luggage hand swiped and it's come back positive my guess is the first question you were asked was if you play golf today because if you did you picked up possibly fertilizer and  that will sometimes confuse these systems and there's lots of confusing for the checked baggage systems for example it's a well known fact that peanut butter is a is something that looks very much like an explosive to those systems so so so those kinds of issues the confusing are the computers is a real problem and finally what has changed a lot of particularly the last few years is the plethora of explosives that we have to deal with you know we originally had a fairly short list of explosive we were concerned about in aviation security and at the checkpoints now there are dozens that show up on the internet that have to be books that people sell you can get must get them off amazon that  that tell people how to how to make homemade explosives and and the list is fairly long and getting longer and these have to be evaluated and i think as was pointed out the signatures then what they look like to our chemical systems to the whole body image or to this is a collection of sensor systems that we're trying to deploy that all has to be worked through this is again during long twilight struggle that we're crane to be be faced with and and so anyway the point is is that the current status is not what we would like it to be and but there is it is a very very very hard problem but nevertheless there's a lot of ideas for how to how to improve  you know a variety of technologies if i might i know i won't have time to go into all these other questions but it seems to me that this has this whole explosive thing really gone to the dogs and that's where we are we trained as only we could deal with that well it takes a long time to train these dogs as i think three sites in the country maybe for a forgotten exact number that actually train these dogs they get tired easily they're not necessarily as reliable as people for example and none of these have particularly worked out as it were to protect i'm going to just open to other subjects and my five minutes is up one is social science side of it we were talking earlier about social science but it seems to me that the visual screening that is to look at somebody and say well maybe to take another look at this individual has a role and there are those in other countries that actually do that to a great extent i'd be interested in the social science piece of that does that really work and the  final question that i would like to get to is that the christmas issue really was more about databases or not and the compatibility in the entire action of databases and the question arises as to computer science and the ability for computer science to deal with the multiple databases and integrating them mr chairman thank you thank you very much mr gammon before i get on to my next set of questions i want to finish up with some further information the last question after my discussion with committee staff two days ago the crackerjack staff went into the hives and found two surveys both done after this christmas incident and both released january eleventh just a few days ago and  survey by c n n finds that let's see full body scanners should be used seventy nine percent should not be used twenty percent no opinion two percent but there are no back up numbers on that so we don't know what the opinion of the traveling public is as opposed to a non traveling sample and gallup usa today organization see findings here the majority sixty seven percent say they would not be personally personally be uncomfortable with undergoing such a scan that's the full body scan that we're talking about close to half forty eight percent saying they would not be uncomfortable at all ten percent say they would be very uncomfortable subject to the such a search and i have to add that the prior preferences were comparing a full body scan versus  their sample take a moment here to find the sample information because i think it's very important to our consideration ok results based on a total sample of national adults ninety five percent confidence results based on a sample of five hundred forty two adults who have taken two or more trips in the past year maximum margin of error is plus or minus five percent but  frequency of flying was really quite disparate about fifty percent flew either frequently or occasionally and the other fifty percent flew never or rarely and so you could fit all the frequent passengers into the don't screen me category or you can fit the fifty percent that flies into the i don't care category and i think it's pretty important to determine what it is whether we're addressing a real problem or not so mr buswell i guess before you come back you're going to have that information broken out for us aren't you and i will take that f screening discussed the importance of understanding the health privacy convenience and comfort impacts of screening technologies and the report eleven years later the two thousand and seven report said very little work has been done in these areas and i want to ask first are three witnesses from nist and s and the labs why have these recommendations been in one sense or another ignored by you respective agencies in doing your work recommendation that we consider privacy filters to mask portions of the of the images whether those be private you know private areas of the body or faces so that you so that those wouldn't be displayed together the fact that images are not stored images of the traveling public are not stored is a recommendation that came from that that report that was adopted putting the screener out of sight of the individual was one of the recommendations and that was adopted by t s a the fact that automatic target recognition which is in fact our highest resource priority for t s a would allow images not to be viewed at all unless in response to to an alarm is one of those things that we're pursuing so i think the most important recommendation that we've adopted is the recommendation to assess as early in the development process as possible  the potential for community community resistance to the implementation of some of these technologies we've got in place a formal process to understand incorporate community perceptions in the development and deployment of critical technologies we call it the technology acceptance and integration program and they look at things like privacy civil rights perceptions whether that be intrusiveness or invasiveness they look at convenience and comfort complexity usability and the perception of threat risk or safety mr buswell before my time expires i'm going to give dr highland an opportunity to comment because you know i'm a generalist i work here in a legislative body it's one thing to disagree with me but dr highlands written testimony states in one thousand nine hundred six the committee found that there had been very little work done to study the public acceptance of screening technologies and when this topic was revisited relative to the committee's work on the whole body imagers in two thousand and seven that had not changed dr harlan would you care to comment about how much work has been done on the public acceptance front certainly i'd like to say that seen it but it was of concern to us that there was nothing in the public publications that we would see that had address as you would expect us to have a large role in this because we're basically in the measurement science but we do have a very effective group usability in our information technology i'm never surprised that  to pick up a little bit where we left off dr albright modeling simulation computing capabilities supercomputers especially within our national laboratories can you just speak specifically to how valuable those are as we move forward with talking about how this can be incorporated into looking at deploying these technologies and creating a safer flying environment for passengers certain let me let me focus on one specific example  basic concern you have when you are thinking about deploying a next generation of any kind of system is what is the minimum amount of explosive you really need to detect in clearly we're not very much interested in  very very small amounts and we so the question is what does what do these systems really have to be able to do and the only way to really know that is to ask yourself what is the vulnerability of the aircraft to various explosive formulations place of various parts on the aircraft sort of two ways you can do this one way is you could go out and buy a whole bunch of airframes and just blow them up and and we we actually do a little bit of that  but that is not to see not a very efficient or cost effective approach the other approach is to use some of the exquisite modeling and supercomputing capability that exists at places like los alamos and livermore and sandia  and to do structural modeling of the air frames and then ask questions like if i put so much explosive at this point in the passenger compartment you know am i going to get rupture a whole  rupture and what were the consequences of that for an airplane airplane under flight conditions that is that is actually pretty hard to do and and it does require validation through some subscale experiments which again al laboratories have the ability to do and do in support of this program and yes it does every once in a while if for no other reason than to make people confident that we are actually know what we're doing we actually occasionally go out and blow up an airplane and  and show that it did we got the right answer but nevertheless that's a fairly broad campaign every year frame is different there are differences between even different embodiments of the seven you have seven fifty seven stretches you have seven fifty seven they all have different structural responses and so you have to have an understanding of that so that you can ultimately set requirements for what that explosive detector has to be able to find when you get to the when you get to the passenger checkpoint thank you dr albright  chairman i think we've seen the importance of making sure that we're looking at simulation modeling supercomputing capabilities to assist us moving in that endeavor as we identify them elect their footprint of some of these chemicals the destructive weapons based materials to do harm and i also appreciate mr bush well that the department of homeland security has moved forward to engage in a more senior level working relationship with our n s c laboratories i think it's important that we identify that technologies like magnets are an important step in identifying where we were weak during this december twenty fifth incident this portable failed attempt that we saw come forward but as we identify the importance about modeling and simulation that we take into consideration the aspects of wondering the whole system and specifically mr bush well if we can get a commitment from v h s that this is one area that we can work with our nash laboratories as well building into this relationship to truly understand the importance of evaluating the whole system of systems level approach to identify weaknesses so that we can have a systematic approach of just solve them before we identify a weakness it comes forward from a failed attempt like this i could have said it better myself that's exactly the exactly the focus of the systems analysis portion of what i started to describe in your last round and just so you know sandia national lab leading that effort the aircraft vulnerability assessment portion of it will be led by morris livermore and then the third area is this idea of emerging technologies what do we not know is out there as you said you know every time i visit a national lab i'm amazed at the the treasure chest of technologies and science that's going on there so how do we bring that to bear to this problem and other homeland security problems and national security problems so  that that work will be co lead by piano now civic northwest national laboratory and los alamos so there's real work to be done there and real and real profit to be made i think mr chairman just another example of how tech transfer and looking to our brightest and best across the country to identify solutions to problems where given the ability and the necessary environment to support that r and d can solve complex issues when it comes to homeland security energy even economic equation so we can understand the complexity of some of the algorithms over use by financial markets with the devastation that those of causes as well again thank you for bringing this to a hearing mr chairman thank you very much mr lew hon and th yes mr buswell i have asked you before and i have also asked your counterpart at the domestic nuclear detection office about the role of comprehensive risk assessment at one point or another there was some concern that that technologies were being developed and risks were being addressed based on how the vice president was feeling that day and i think the prior vice president the current vice president might assess those things very very differently and one hopes that in our research endeavor for d h s that we have a steady hand and guided by real risk assessments so i'd like to ask you to address that the role of comprehensive risk assessment in creating a multi tiered detection prevention approach and how this dovetails into using the risk assessment process first of all i think the last time that i was here we discussed the importance of of an overall risk assessment and i'm pleased to see in the quadrennial homeland security review report that was released earlier this week that the need for a national risk assessment framework was highlight was identified as one of those highly important things that we need to go forward with so i know the secretary understands that she's and she's engaged in that in that broader national risk assessment that we discussed earlier mr buswell can you send back a report to this committee on the progress of implementing the systematic likewise i'd be pleased to coordinate with t s a to bring to the committee that that risk assessment that they do regularly and they revisit regularly depending on the based on the threats that are emerging you know as dr albright said at one time there were very few things that we were worried about people bringing guns and you know commercial grade or military grade explosives on airplanes that list is quite long and prioritizing the list of things that we have to look for and prioritizing the the amounts of stablish in the amounts of these various substances that we need to look for is high on the list of things that we need to do and is fundamental to that risk assessment so i would be pleased to coordinate that we have a society that really focuses on technology and it has served us well in so many different ways but dr albright mentioned it several different ways why detection technology is very challenged by the nature of the current threat mr garamendi asked about dogs somewhat seriously and somewhat humorously i remember being at an airport in canada and having this friendly little dog come along and i was kind of disappointed that it just went right by me but i think in retrospect that was a good thing it sat down and looked expectantly at this nice young man and the nice young man was promptly taken away by the mounties to do what i don't know i doubt that it was explosives i suspect that it was something more fragrant and you know the dog could was was up to the task but it's not just our brother and north of the border that do this right here if you drive your car over to the capitol they will stop you and first they run a mirror to look on the underside your car and then a dog comes and my kids and i refer to that as getting your car dog and i don't know how effective that dog is what i do know is that that dog works in daytime and nighttime low temperature high temperature when it's dirty when it's snowing etc now the puffer machines that were deployed on an experimental basis  i believe one hundred of them were deployed around the country on on a trial basis and the fact the figures that we have set those were one hundred fifty thousand dollars or more each and i'm told i mean i haven't seen the puffers in a while and i'm told the reason why the puffers were pulled is because humidity and dust caused a puff or breakdown or puff confusion and i'm not sure that a dog would have the same problem and my impression is that five hundred dollars buys you a pretty good dog now granted you have to feed the dog you have to train the dog etc but the puffer machine was difficult to maintain why are we building an fishel dog knows when we have a pretty good dog knows dr cors range of different threats that the dogs are being trained to different can be different in a mass transit environment that is in the aviation and as you mentioned some dogs are trained for for narcotics others are trained for money others are trying for cadavers so there's actually a group called developed that has a series of committees that look at the standards for training methods for these dogs but i think there's a lot of basic science still be done here because we don't know if a dog is reacting whether it's reacting to the particles or to some of the vapors that are associated with solvents that were used in a lot of life is kind of empirical you know  and we need to work out how a dog does this but i think the rubber hits the road in finding whether dogs can detect explosives the kind of explosives that we're concerned about on a reliable basis as my breath metallica indicates that if you have a five hundred dollars puppy which is a pretty expensive one you get three hundred of them for a puffer machine and the question is whether three hundred dogs in an airport is more useful than one puffer machine and dr albright you addressed the technical issues a lot earlier and perhaps you could try to address this a little bit more sure let me just reiterate the fact that the first we don't we understand very well why the dogs are as good as they are but are they the question is are they good so that's that that is a good point and in fact it sometimes depends a lot of the testing methodology and i won't go into it here but i could reveal you offline about my experiences when i was at the white house reviewing the anthrax smelling dogs and that was that was and it turned out that the test procedure was totally biased mean did they couldn't do the job well i'd look if i were a dog i wouldn't want to be sniffing anthrax either well i mean maybe these dogs are just brighter than you would give them credit yeah yeah well no no it isn't me i was i was a few evaluator i was not the proponent for this that's that's a whole other story training regimen they have to go i realize that mounts up and then finally there is a range of explosives that it is not known how broad a range including these homemade explosives that we're concerned about that they can actually so you're right to some science questions that have to be dealt with but the investment that would have to be made in order to really poppy populate our explosive detection infrastructure would dogs to the numbers that we would need to do it well you know we really haven't done a very good job of populating airports with usable detection technologies you know and that cost a hundred or two hundred thousand dollars each now i realize that there are challenges in acquisition and maintenance and you know on and on but you know sometimes in our society and you know i'm on the science and technology committee that we have and an absolute love affair with with whiz bang gadgets and sometimes it turns out that something simple and inexpensive and deployable is being overlooked because we have made assumptions i mean it was in this complex of buildings that a nobel physicist dumped an old ring into a glass of cold water and said well you know this might be why the space shuttle blew up so you know sometimes we need to review our assumptions and our inclination toward complexity so you know if i should be worried that the dogs guarding the u s capitol or sniffing cars out there that that they're not doing a good job and that they're not reliable and that they're going to get tired of me you ought to tell me that that's the case but you know it seems to me that those dogs are out there seven by twenty four and i know that the capitol is not you know several thousand airplanes flying around the usa but you're not going to tell me that a country that can deploy millions of troops overseas during world war two cannot deploy a few hundred dogs in civilian airports in the continental us if this is truly the long twilight struggle that solutions i have to confess that i haven't looked at it in a while as to whether what are the trades between the thousands of dogs you would have to deploy in an airport environment and and  and the technologies that that we are deploying i would point out i think you i think you made the point yourself that the operating environment out here and driving into the capital is a very different environment than one at the passenger checkpoint but nevertheless the points a good one and it's probably a good idea to go back and dust off some of those systems studies and ask the question whether or not whether or not maybe we're missing something you know i think it's really important to try to review some of these assumptions and test them again and the operational test is does it work and you know it's really nice to understand  why but you know if if if if if you've got to understand the how in the why before you deploy something that works you may not win some struggles that you might otherwise be able to win now i've never been a conspiracy type person i do think that as a society we naturally favor technology and sometimes it's more expensive than simpler things i do want to on this record make the observation that these technological means are also well they keep the national laboratories occupied they keep the producers of the technology occupied and you know some of these manufacturers have representatives in washington d c and i don't think the kennel club is very well represented here and i don't know if that has anything to do with it but i sure would like to have some of these easy assumptions revisit it or else  i'd like to have puffer machines at the u s capitol you know rather than what they're currently doing let's shift now to you know one of the challenges here is  that for you all is that we fly a lot you know congressman fly a lot and so we we think we know everything there is to know about flying and being a passenger at least and we've all had experiences where something that is detected at one airport or on one given day is not detected on another day you know you try to take everything out of the bags but you have a four ounce bottle of fluid in the limits three point five and on some days it's spotted and you have to remove it and other days it's not i don't always travel with a laptop but sometimes i do and every once in a great while i forget to take it out of the pocket of my carry on bag and as often as not i don't know if they just wave it through it seems to me that when it when they catch it they make it pull it helped but sometimes it seems like they don't they don't catch it and if i'm in a hurry i'm grateful and so on intentional that that happened but most of the time i also feel a little concerned that what they say is important isn't caught can you can the panel try to count for this disturbing variability in in the screening process at our airports  the science guy so i don't have the operational insight to know you know the facts about these things i know anecdotally i've heard the same sorts of things and what i would tell you is that what we're looking at from the research mr buswell let me jump in right here because this is a really important point you said i'm the science guy and i don't know some of the operational things that is the and that is a very important problem that we're trying to address because you're not producing the stuff into a vacuum it's not about the gives about it's about the effective service that that gives mo provides so you really do have to account for all the operational factors i mean if you produce a great weapon but the operators don't know how to operate it or like the russian tank that is manually loaded but you can only manually load it with a midget i'm sorry with a short russian who is left handed you know that causes a real problem so you know what we're trying to hook up  here is it is a technology that is actually implemented by in the real world short and my point with that was that the operational requirements the t s a establishes or what we do our research and things that we're working with t s a to do as i mentioned is this idea of automatic target recognition so you're not relying so heavily on the screener who may have been there for some period of time and you know and  fatigued and may miss something so what we're trying to do is we're trying to develop these kinds of technologies that will help us help the screeners be more effective we're trying to look at from a behavior detection standpoint can we identify people who intend to do harm before they ever get in the into the screening process we're looking things like and you make a very good point with the dogs i mean t s a is a system of systems there is no silver bullet here  which is why t s a employees seven hundred dog teams i mean they you know they believe that the that that capability is real too and the training training occurs at both ends of the leash and the problem is that one of the problems as dr albright cited is there's no way to calibrate the device prior to use so you know if the dogs have a good day or a bad day or so there's limitations and we have to understand those limitations and build them into the system  on site and and determine whether the dog is tired or not ought to be pulled off the line if you have a if you have a training device on site with which to do that and so one of the things the t s a has asked us to do is develop some low cost training devices that we can use in the field where we don't have to take the dogs back to the training center so we can more frequently train train the dogs to do these sorts of things so there is research in development going on in all of these areas that will try to mitigate or try to minimize the probability that things you know the things will slip through and this is a system of systems this is a layered approach to security that includes dogs and technology and people and all of those all those things that make it maximally effect think the core concern is that based on individual experience and then what is reported in the news media the american people have a legitimate concern about whether all this inconvenience is producing a result that we all want and that that you know that really is the core inquiry so let me go on to one last i know that mr smith told me long ago that he had to attend to certain but not the concerns of other customers such as the traveling public airlines and airports is this true and if it is would considering these other concerns such as customers the traveling public air carriers the ports that offer that operate airports would this have to surface some of the problems earlier resulted in different technologies being deployed  different research efforts and yes i think that taking into account the public's perception but the operators of the sheen are also involved in the whole aviation security technology so designing the machines so that   it is only one part and the traveling public has come to kind of expect that variability which i think is unfortunate of acceptance of nonstandard performance microwave vehicle stopping and in other words law enforcement or others who need to stop vehicles whether those are cars or boats can you use a microwave device in order to do that and what would be the concerns that people would have with privacy groups ethicists and then also for each of these technologies will include specific subject matter experts for example on the vehicle stopping technology we had a member of the american automobile association as part of the so and of course the coastguard and c b p and others that law enforcement entities that would be interested in using the technology so a series of these we've done several on screening technologies we've done several on the mobile b metrics and they allow us to understand and to modify the technology development in a way that makes it more likely that it will be able to be deployed by the operators at the at the end of the develop process so i think we've got we've got a real we've got a real success story there with these with these public acceptance efforts and this gets to the point that was in the was in the national academies engage early in assessing exist and what people will accept in what they view as overly intrusive to the extent that you actually involve passengers in your groups that's commendable to the extent that you're counting on the opinions of folks who are opining about people you know that's that's a risky thing to do and apparently you know there are at least two surveys here where they actually ask people and got answers and i don't have the granularity in this data to unpack the significance of these  public and the really frequent flyers vs the never flyers vs the sometime flyers and there really is no substitute for asking there really is no substitute for accurate data and i think that's true in a whole bunch of fields in science and it's true in your field and it's true of mine also i really want to express my deep appreciation to each and every one of the witnesses here today we are engaged in a very very important collective endeavor it is about convenience and public acceptance and economics for airlines that if you sum up all their financial activity over the history of the airlines it's not clear that there is one dollar a profit in there so you know they're living on the edge and if we want to have a privately owned air transit system then we ought to help  m do their job rather than put unreasonable constraints in their way but the endeavor that we are engaged in is even more important because it is about public safety and we face all sorts of different risks but currently you know folks are very much focused inappropriately so on this terrorism threat and the threat of human made incidents on airplanes and we need to address that  as aggressively as the american people want us to but i think most fundamentally this is about whether this government can do what job can do any job can do a job well because what is most corrosive is that experience at the airport that there's incredible v in the service at that security checkpoint if any other business entity had that much variability i mean you know mcdonald's has a hamburger you so that you don't get a different burger at every mcdonald's that you go to and that you don't get a different burger depending on whether you in the morning or the afternoon we need to add a more elevated level of conversation we need to do this task well because it is important for its own sake but ultimately we need to do it well because it's the only reason ultimately why there is a bond between ourselves and the government some some believe that it does well i think john kennedy said if i wanted to make a difference in the way people perceive the federal government i'd start by changing the postal service and that's with all respect to my friends in the postal service and i have a riff on that which is if i were governor of oregon the first thing that i would do to change the public perception is work with d m v to brighten up the service there the american people come into contact with the federal government as much through the t s a and at airports as any other place let's do our best to get it right thank you very much and written questions will be submitted by the staff and by by members  again thank you for being here and we really want to work with you to make sure that you have the legislative support and the physical support to get these very very important tasks right so we will come back to this in due course thank you all very much this hearing is that