I wonder what kind of training border security personnel have. With their increased authority I wonder if there is additional training they go through.
I wish I could find a great article that was posted in another forum around the time the government authorized the full body airport scanners. It talked about how North American airport security is going down an incredibly expensive and altogether ineffective road.
It compared the airport security of Tel-Aviv to its North American counter parts. At the Israeli airport there are something like 6 security checkpoints, 4 soft and 2 hard, something along those lines. The soft checkpoints are manned by an officer with behavioral profiling training that would ask simple questions designed to guage certain reactions, or the same officers with the same training watching security cameras and flagging certain observations....
I'm not going to describe the whole article, the gist of it was that in order to adequately screen travelers, North America doesn't need to spend more taxpayers dollars on new fancy technology, it needs to undergo a complete change in philosophy that starts at the highest levels and could take years.
I kind of went off on a bit of a tangent there, but I am wondering if these border security officers have similar training that caused them to notice certain behavioral patterns that made them seem like either a giant ass or a nice person who is just interested, as people are describing above.
I'm going to see if I can find that article again. It was in the Toronto Star a few months back....
EDIT: Wasn't that hard of a search
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/ar...-little-bother