Badly the step

After the 11 of September of 2001, there is no watched place in New York more than the station of Pensilvania, or Penn Station. There, a sophisticated device tries to detect terrorists by its way to walk

In all the city of New York populating and than the station with Pensilvania, or Penn Station is no site more tumultuoso. There the trains that go from Chicago and Montreal to the New Orleans and Atlanta, in addition to the expresses converge who unite Boston with Washington, more nine lines of subterraneans. From the enormous subsoil they leave the services for Long Island, in whom three hundred thousand passengers travel. Of the intermediate floor, all the other trains.

The Madison Square Garden arrives yergue, that accumulates almost all the great sport spectacles of the enormous city. The Encyclopedia of New York City supposes that around that cathedral of plastic and steel, located between the Seventh Avenue and Eighth, they circulate more than thousand people per minute. After the 11 of September of 2001, there is not either no watched place more. Next to the entrance of street 31, in front of the deposit of valises, yergue a position of soldiers with camouflage uniform.

That is the visible face of the services of security. Other tens of people go and come by the corridors, without fixed course, simulating that observe flowing of the life although in truth they are on the lookout of terrorists and pumps. Soon monitors of monitoring will settle able to register how each traveller walks.

According to the investigators of Georgia Tech, who have designed the device for the Division of Advanced Projects of the Department of Defense, each person has a different way to walk, in special the terrorists.

By means of his gait signatures could so effectively be detected as if they left its impressions digital.

By incredible that seems, people create completely without information in those things, and thanks to them feel safer. Like in all New York, the baths public are also little in Penn Station: two for women and two for men in each floor.

Who plus use them they are the personages without ceiling who sleep in the businesses of the lobby or the contiguous streets.

Always there is somebody cleaning up in the automatic washbasins, or shaving themselves with the naked torso, or washing the head and drying it soon under the hot air mouths.

The acoustics is perfect there. In no other part of the station they hear concerti of Bach so well, Vivaldi, Haendel and Corelli that the loudspeakers spread the 24 hours.

Although nobody has informed that the device of the Department of Defense has begun to work, the 6 of June had in the bath of men of the zone of Amtrak, near the Eighth Avenue, an indication that the laboratory tests already are at least in march. That day, towards the 3 of afternoon, a man who would measure not more of a meter sixty, identified soon like a legal immigrant of Liberia, was cornered in the bath by a whole patrol of police in uniform battle, with helmets and machine guns. The suspect, of bent legs, that contoneaba like a duck, took bulks in the pockets and carried a plastic bottle of four liters, of suspicious content.

The immediate diagnosis of the security office was: Terrorist threat. It alerts red. During two hours, the area the west of the station was immobilized and I lost six consecutive trains. I could not either return to the bath.

The Liberian immigrant was there being interrogated and being examined with scrupulous patience. Finally, the one of the bottle was determined that the content of its pockets was dirty underclothes and, peanut oil.

To 5,10 of afternoon the routine returned, who knows by how long.

The device of Georgia Tech promises to be implacable.

The author is journalist, academic writer and