The White House announced that airports will use intelligence information to screen travelers to the the United States. According to the Washington Post, the passengers will no longer be screened based on nationality and "will instead select passengers based on possible matches to intelligence information, including physical descriptions or a particular travel pattern." An anonymous official told the NY Times, "This is not a system that can be called profiling in the traditional sense. It is intelligence-based."

After the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a flight, the Obama administration put in place, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, "mandatory secondary screening for all passengers from 14 countries, including nations designated as state sponsors of terrorism and many Muslim-majority countries." Now, all passengers, including U.S. citizens coming back to the States, could undergo the special screening.

An anonymous White House official also LA Times that he would "like to think" this kind of screening "would have increased our chances to stop" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day bomber, and that screeners would have caught the bomb in his underwear.