Airport security, profiling and saving money.

[meus_ovatio]

The recent internet kerfluffle over body-scanners and molester-guards has raised once again the question of racial profiling. I say "internet kerfluffle" because that is exactly what it was. Internet junkies and activists worked up the froth and bubble and... and then nothing. This is because we tend to get confused between The Internets and Real

Comments

[light_over_me]

Just don't let Muslims fly then.

Except that we could specifically profile for terrorists without targeting all Muslims. The problem is that we won't because we're being told that profiling for behavior associated with terrorism is equivalent to profiling for race alone, which is a fallacy.

Example,

A smiling Muslim family en route to Disney World, with a domestic two way ticket to Florida for the week. Yeah probably not a threat. A young single Muslim man in his early 20s, with a one way ticket from Yemen to New York, with a faint chemical smell on his clothes, spotted loitering nervously around some unmarked bags in the lobby... yeah, maybe we should look twice there.

The problem is, we are operating under the mistaken assumption that there are no warning signs for terrorism, other than someone's race or religion, so therefore we must screen everyone. That isn't accurate. In fact, for both the shoe bomber and underwear bomber, the government knew about them. First of all, the Underwear Bomber was already on a government watch

[meus_ovatio]

The misconception is that people seem to think that anti-racial profiling means that we won't look closely at people with faint chemical smells on them. I mean... that is just ludicrous. THAT IS NOT RACIAL PROFILING. What it is, is that people make up ridiculous appeals to consequences that have nothing to do with the reality of our security apparatus.

[light_over_me]

The fact that racial profiling, and behavioral profiling are two different things is true (as I also pointed out)... but the fact is that these two things are often conflated. When we are ignoring individuals who are already on government watch lists, and then turning around using these same people as an excuse to implement full body scans on everyone, then there is a problem. There is no justification for full body scans on everyone, when we already have effective tools at our disposal.

[meus_ovatio]

I agree. The problem is that we have no way to coordinate effectively beyond abolishing all security agencies outside of the FBI and the CIA. (Domestic and foreign). Of course, politics being what it is, you can't just abolish the DHS or the seventeen varying intelligence agencies that all have a piece of the pie. Or even limiting the Defense Intelligence Agency to defense and combat related intelligence. Yes, it is all a huge mess.

But of course, simply implementing racial profiling is not the fix-all or solution to these issues. It's a complete non-sequitur. The fact that we can't coordinate intelligence is no argument for racial profiling.

[light_over_me]

Agreed, simply profiling by race alone, without taking behavior into account, wouldn't be effective either. It'd be too easy for terrorists to get around it by using someone who didn't fit the stereotyped physical profile (in fact they already *do* attempt to blend in). That's why you'd need to look at the whole picture. Same as you would do to catch people smuggling drugs, etc, who could be of any race....It's the human element-- you'd have to look people in the eye (instead of their computerized naked body on a monitor in a separate room)