PASSENGERS on flights in America are being watched even if they are not suspected of a crime, not under investigation and are not on any terrorist watch list. That raises immediate concerns about disturbing and unnecessary surveillance.

Under the program “Quiet Skies”, federal air marshals have been shadowing travelers on their flights and reporting any suspicious behavior. The US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) defends the program, in place since 2010 but first reported last week by the Boston Globe, as “a practical method of keeping another act of terrorism from occurring at 30,000 feet”, the first being 9/11.

Before people board a plane and are watched by federal air marshals, officials use information from the intelligence community and passengers’ previous travel patterns to help choose whom to target. While the TSA would not provide details on the precise criteria required to flag a passenger for the program, air marshals look for excessive fidgeting, excessive nervousness, excessive sweating, cold penetrating stare, wide open staring eyes, touching ones face, how much passengers sleep during a flight and use a smartphone. They also look at changing clothes, going to the bathroom frequently, abruptly changing direction while moving through an airport, whether passengers tremble or blink rapidly during a flight, talk to other travelers, are abnormally aware of surroundings, and rub or wring their hands.

The marshals are trying to determine whether this person is going to take any evil action on a plane. But an innocent person can exhibit any number of these behaviors. It is possible that this how would-be terrorists behave in airports and airplanes but these behavior cues apply to almost everybody. Trying to pick out a wrongdoer based on a twitch on the face or a hand that shakes is like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.

And if this is how terrorists indeed act, they will try to act much more “normally”, now that the cat is out of the bag.

Furthermore, TSA is granted broad discretion in picking and choosing who it would target for investigation. Something as simple as a transit stop in an Arab country or flying an Arab airline is enough to make one a terrorist suspect.

The TSA program, in which 40-50 passengers per day are being monitored, seems to be a very amateurish way of finding airline culprits, more akin to the Pink Panther movies when the inept French police detective Jacques Clouseau tracked his suspects by watching them through a hole he cut out in a newspaper.

What it all means is that the TSA has the authority to trail you even without any suspicion of wrongdoing. Despite the TSA’s assertion that if a passenger’s behavior is uneventful and the flight goes smoothly, they will not be approached or arrested, despite its claims that it is not using this program to target ethnic and religious minorities, and that the program is designed to ignore people clearly traveling for business or to visit family, and focuses only on potential threats, surveillance absent suspected wrongdoing is troubling. Following innocent passengers by trying to define the impossible and unrealistic task of what is considered strange behavior will most likely not make travel safer.

Even some air marshal have concerns about the program, saying focusing on passengers who look suspicious pulls the marshals away from their mission of protecting the cockpit because they are keeping up surveillance of the individual.

TSA should go back to when air marshals were seated on planes and served as the last line of defense against terrorists attempting to take the cockpit. This new method provides marshals with hardly an inkling of a threat. That TSA is conducting pervasive surveillance of travelers without any suspicion of actual wrongdoing, even if not legally wrong, doesn’t sound right.