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

[rasilio]

Actually no it would not be cheaper.

The lost revenue from Muslims not being allowed to fly would be far larger than the cost of say conducting a full body cavity search on every muslim who wishes to do so.

Of course this assumes that you accept the falsehood that Profiling must be based on a single characteristic such as race or religion.

The fact is that profiling done right considers all factors age, gender, race, religion, country of origin, documentation, dress, behavior, and so on and if you are not doing it then you are not doing security because you are wasting your scarce resources to conduct random searches on people that any 6th grader could determine pose no threat to anyone in about 10 seconds only to find a pair of nail clippers they mistakenly left in their pockets while the real threat sails past because he was not chosen for a random search.

[meus_ovatio]

I have no idea what you're talking about. The issue is about racial profiling specifically. Behavior profiling is something else. You've completely misinterpreted the stakes of the controversy as some kind of weird anti-profiling position. This is just silly. When people are arguing against racial profiling, they aren't arguing against profiling. They're arguing against racial profiling. Most people who are against racial profiling are for behavioral profiling, for example. Considering this, I have no idea what you're on about.

[rasilio]

Doesn't matter.

If 95% of all terrorists are males between the ages of 18 and 30 who originate from The Middle East or North Africa and worship Allah (which is true) then one cannot claim to actually be trying to make anything secure while ignoring this fact.

That those terrorists make up only 1/100th of 1% of the population who fits that profile is irrelevant devoting security to people who fit that profile is 19 times more likely to identify a terrorist than security spent investigating anyone who does not fit that profile.

The question then becomes what kind of extra security you will apply to this profile, one need not immediately jump to body cavity searches just because they fit the profile, it could be as simple as 3 extra questions asked by the security agents trained to detect deception to see if they warrant further investigation. In fact the extra security could be largely invisible to the target should he pass the check.

[meus_ovatio]

Oh it doesn't matter. And it's 19 times more likely. Hey, I'll make up numbers too. No wait, I won't. Ya see, the thing is, behavioral profiling is more effective. Since it not only catches the contemporary issue of terrorism, it also catches the other stuff as well. Unless of course if we're not really concerned with security as security, and more concerned with "catching terrorists" as some kind of stand-in for the concept.

[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.

[dreadfulpenny81]

The recent internet kerfluffle over body-scanners and molester-guards...

Is there any possible way that we can PLEASE stop attacking the TSA workers? They're not doing anything other than following procedures. Right now, this is a tough market for a job and while I'm sure you might think you would just be able to quit if you disagreed with the TSA procedures, I'm sure it's not so easy for any of them, especially during the holidays. Use a little common sense.