Holy shit, now all football fans are suspects:

Authorities at Super Bowl XLIII will be looking for more than just drunken fans. They’ll be watching spectators’ body language, facial expressions and demeanor to find suspicious people.

For the first time Sunday, federal behavior-detection officers will team with local police to use a controversial technique on people heading to a major event, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) says. The officers usually work in airports.

Behavior observation aims to find people in crowds acting unusually. A flagged person gets a casual interview from an officer who determines if he or she should be formally questioned or arrested.

How the hell are you supposed to tell when someone’s mad that Big Ben got sacked and when the bomb strapped under their puffy coat is itching them?  The ACLU thinks that

TSA should stay in the airports and let stadium security and local police do their job and monitor the crowd as they always have. Real life is not like a spy thriller where operatives with amazing intuitions are always able to magically pick out the people with something to hide. This is likely to slide into a thinly veiled version of racial profiling. (emphasis added)

I mean, I’m all for safety and what-not.  Who isn’t?  This isn’t safety, though.  In the real world — where security resources are always limited — wasting time, money and energy on things that probably won’t work makes little sense.  One could argue that this year’s game is the testing ground for this invasive new “method”.  That’s even less sensible.  Assuming that someone’s gonna try and bomb the Superbowl, I’d prefer to see a tested method, rather than this bullshit.

What’s going to happen next year, they’ll watch everyone at home to see how they react to the game or their wired cooler of Pabst*?

Read more (via Blog of Rights).

[*I'm not knocking Pabst.  I love Pabst, seriously.]