Meaning I would normally have ignored & deleted it.
I think you’re being incredibly naive here. There is not, and never will be, a “perfect” security procedure. There’s just increasing levels of security, each of which costs more money and takes more time. Sure, if there were a 100% effective anti-terror-machine that we could buy and install at all airports, I’d agree that we should do it, and few people would argue. But anything approaching 100% security is not going to be just spending more money to get a fancier X-ray machine that everyone can walk through, it’s going to be “OK, sir, please remove ALL of your clothes, and take ALL of your items out of ALL of your bags, and these 5 professionally trained individuals will inspect every single item you own with chemicals and microscopes and so forth. You DID arrive 20 hours early for your flight, didn’t you?”.
So, if we can’t have 100% security for all travellers, we have to take the resources (both in terms of money and staff, and in terms of the amount of delay that passengers are willing to put up with) and allocate them in the most efficient manner possible. And unless you can prove otherwise in some fashion other than hand-waving, I claim (based on the argument I made in my previous post) that it might well be the case that we would get the most security by deciding how to allocate those resources based on profiling.
Which doesn’t necessarily mean we should. Honestly, it’s a difficult issue, and one that I don’t have a definitive comfortable answer for. But your argument that it can’t possibly actually lead to increased security (and the claim that Dead Badger seems to be making in post #34, which is that it would actually make overall security WORSE) is naive and flawed.
Look, of course I’d take the 500 dollars from Bill Gates. That’s a no brainer. But I ain’t going to pretend that he’s making some huge sacrifice in order to do it.
Really? I thought the point that an observable search strategy based on historical profiling will in fact create easily targeted weaknesses was quite reasonable, myself. Given the numerous documented examples of terrorists who fitted no operable profile, and the development of algorithmic exploitations of existing profiling methods, I think it’s entirely realistic to say that differential targeting based on racial information will in fact weaken a security system. Do you have any specific refutation of these arguments, or are you just going to brand them “naive”? To recap, the argument is this:
- With a given amount of resources, to search one group more, you must search another less.
- Therefore, at the same time as you decrease one group’s chance of success (evading search), you increase that of another.
- Your search policy is unavoidably observable.
- Therefore, people can discover what characteristics give an increased chance of success.
- Therefore, they can exploit this information to gain an increased chance of success over and above that which they had prior to profiling.
Which of these points do you think is naive, or for that matter, wrong?
I see your point, Max, but does it make sense to do something “Wrong” in the bigger picture just because you don’t know what else to do?
Given the demonstrated craftiness of terrorists, wouldn’t it make sense to dump the profiling business and simply do random searches of the same number of passengers as would normally be subjected to the dark man profile? I’d be willing to be the Bad Guys are hip to the fact we know vaguely what they look like by now, and that they are already taking measures to devlop a personnel base consisting of a variety of flavors, ages & genders.
The only metaphor that comes to mind compares profiling to a baseball batter. He swings high and outside because the last 2 pitches were high and outside. A good pitcher anticipates this behavior and throws someplace else. I’d be interested to see how long this problem continues to use swarthy males between the ages of 17 - 40, as opposed to, I dunno, gangstas converted to Islam, or skinheads looking for a thrill?
Inigo Montoya
As rjung said, the best response to this type of glurge is a counter quiz. Being somewhat pushed for time today I’ve only done 10 questions and there may be some errors but by and large it’s accurate. Feel free to send this to your spammers, although I would say that the more questions you can add the better.
- Since 1866 hundreds of black Americans were beaten, raped, and lynched by:
A) Sarah Michelle Gellar.
B) Spongebob Squarepants.
C) Captain Pugwash.
D) White, Christian, male extremists between the ages of 17 and 40.
2) Dr Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by:
A) The Easter Bunny.
B) Marcel Marceau
C) Conga master Poncho Sanchez.
D) A white, Christian, male extremist between the ages of 17 and 40.
- In 1979, Lord Mountbatten, Lady Braybourne, and her two children were killed by a bomb planted by:
A) Lucille Ball.
B) The Toxic Avenger.
C) Doctor Who.
D) White, Christian, male extremists between the ages of 17 and 40.
4) Prominent radio host Alan Berg was assassinated by:
A) Jay and Silent Bob.
B) Herman Munster.
C) Foghorn Leghorn.
D) White, Christian, male extremists between the ages of 17 and 40.
- In 1995 168 people were killed and over 500 more were wounded by a bomb placed in the Oklahoma City building by:
A) Tenacious D.
B) Inspector Gadget.
C) Willie Nelson.
D) White, Christian, male extremists between the ages of 17 and 40.
6) In 1996 one person was killed and over 100 were injured by a bomb planted adjacent to the Atlanta Olympics stadium by:
A) Barney Gumble.
B) Pink.
C) Charlie Chan.
D) A white, Christian, male extremist between the ages of 17 and 40.
- Dr Barnett Slapien, an abortion provider from New York City was murdered by:
A) Otto Von Bismarck.
B) Captain Birdseye.
C) Speedy Gonzalez.
D) A white, Christian, male extremist between the ages of 17 and 40.
- On August 15th 1998 29 people were killed and hundreds more were injured in Omagh by a bomb planted by:
A) The Smurfs.
B) Mel Gibson.
C) Regis and Kathy Lee.
D) White, Christian, male extremists between the ages of 17 and 40.
9) Attribute this quote:
- “You could hear people screaming and crying and moaning. One of the most horrendous memories for me was seeing a head stuck to a wall. A couple of days later we found vertebrae and a ribcage on the roof of a nearby building.”*
to one of the following:
A) A part-time Border’s staff member describing a Jane Fonda book signing.
B) A TV presenter discussing the Chelsea flower show.
C) An ESPN sportscaster speaking of the time he managed to sneak into Mike Tyson’s dressing room.
D) A British Police officer describing the aftermath of an attack carried out by white, Christian, male extremists between the ages of 17 and 40.
10) This quiz, humorous while still being factual in nature is most likely to offend:
A) Debaser
B) Bigots.
C) Spineless pussies who think every vaguely Asiatic looking person wants to kill them.
D) All of the above.
Now sure, Islam is plagued by violent extremism to a greater extent than Christianity. However, all racial and religious groups have their share of violent extremists and to apply the reasoning behind racial profiling, that since X% of group Y have performed action Z, all members of group Y are potential practitioners of action Z, solely to Muslims is to apply a double standard.
Put another way, while vacationing in Thailand I had the dubious pleasure of witnessing what can only be described as a staggering display of vaginal dexterity by a Filipino lap dancer. Such displays shouldn’t be used as evidence that all Asian women can queef Ping-Pong balls into beer glasses.
Nobody’s asking you to. What I’m saying is that it’s not right to kick him in the nuts because in your view it wasn’t enough. The whole proportional aid thing is just another method that people have found to kick the US in the nuts, and it’s just plausible enough to make it sound like the US is cheap, which is absolutely not the truth.
Could you elaborate as to exactly what “right” these people are being deprived of? “Not being offended” isn’t a right as far as I know, although Lord knows the offenderati want to make it one.
MMmmmmmmaybe…something to do with unreasonable SEARCH and siezure? Just a WAG there.
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Agreed.
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Agreed.
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Not necessarily. Nothing is to say that physicallity is the only profile being used. I would say that it shouldn’t be. And that profiling should not be used as the sole tool.
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See #3, but I see your point. Eventually, they most likely will. But the profile is not etched in stone. It changes as information changes. If it get’s to the point that a particular profile ceases to make practical sense (for instance, females, children, old men, and those of all races are recruited to become suicide bombers), then the profile should be off the table.
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Yes. And if they do, the profile will change. Maybe even to the point of being abandoned. The question is, in making it more difficult for terrorists by employing a particular profile, have lives been saved?
That’s the gamble. And the hard part is that it is a gamble either way.
How would you evaluate these steps? (Sorry about the length, but I was tryin to build in all contingencies.)
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With a given amount of resources, you need to be as efficient with those resources as possible.
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Therefore, if a partuclar definable group is believed to be much more likely to commit terriorst acts, it makes sense to devout more resources to that group, per capita, than to the population as a whole.
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Terrorists are not stupid. They will study and work to succeed outside your profile.
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Therefore, the profile must be dynamic, changing as information dictates.
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Sooner or later the profile will be broken completely and need to be abandoned.
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Therefore, it is important to have other terrorist stopping tools already in place.
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For the time that a profile is useful, it is an additional obstacle for terrorists to overcome, making it more difficult for terrorists to succeed.
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For as long as we make it more difficult for terrorists to succeed, they will be less successful:
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The less succesful they are, the more lives that will have been saved.
Sorry for the snark. This isn’t the place for it.
Here’sAmendment #4.
I argue that searching the persons, on behalf of a government agency, based principally on racial or perceived racial/ethnic criteria alone, is unreasonable because 1) the majority of the people described by that profile are not terrorists and 2) there is a high likelihood that the profile will cease to be indicative of terrorists in the near future if it is not already.
Inigo linked to the 4th amendment.
But, really, are you intentionally being naive? Isn’t racism simply a violation of rights based on race? If not, then what is racism?
And before you say that racial profiling isn’t racism, think about what racial profiling really is:
Law enforcement will judge an individual’s potential to commit a crime based solely on the appearence of that individual.
Please correct me if you think my description is incorrect, or missing something.
I think you know this is a bit ridiculous, but I’ll respond to the compartive aspects of your question, which are the ones that are related to the issue.
If If the next 10 acts of terrorism against us werre the result of people with red hair and blue eyes, I’d say they they should be profiled, and their bags searched. If it were blonde women over six feet that were responsible, profile them.
This is realted to a comment you made in a later thread:
When it comes to fighting crime, a “minority” is a good thing. If someone robs you on the street, it would be very helpful in his apprehension if he was a seven-foot tall albino. Because the suspect pool would probably be a “minority” of, oh I don’t know, two?
Is this racist when applied to, as you say, Arabs? “Arab” isn’t a race, but I get your point. If you define racist benignly, as having to do with race, or based upon race, I’d say yes. But know more racist than developing medicine specifically for African Americans (which they are doing right now).
When looking for criminals, law enforcement tries to continually narrow down the pool of possible suspects. Physical characteristics are used in the pursuit every day. I see know reason why the same tool shouldn’t be use in crime prevention. IF we can use physicallity to define a small enough pool, by all means use it. If the attempt to do so results in a pool that is too large (males, females, those between 5’6" and 61", people with brown hair) do not use it. It depends on the profile and the degree to which people in the profile might stand out from the general population. A pool of red-haired, blue-eyed people might be a terrific tool in Madagascar, but a useless tool in Ireland.
I thiink they are very important. It goes to what we wuld view as reasonable. I don’t mind taking off my shoes and opening my bags, but the cavity search ain’t happening. Law enforcement has to take that into consideration, as a degree of cooperation with their efforts is required.
But DUUUUUUUUUUUDE! It’s alright to profile for a 7 foot tall albino who’s done a crime because you know for sure you’re looking for a SPECIFIC 7 foot tall albino–the one who has ALREADY done the dirty deed.
If we were trying to catch one of the 9/11 bastards, and we knew we were looking for a number of Arab-looking guys, then yeah I’m all for profiling. But since these guys were all incinerated the profile is pretty useless because they don’t look much like Arab guys anymore, and they’d be damned hard to indict as they’re just a mess of ashes.
I’m bitching (and beginning to drool again) about a policy that makes as much sense as “Hello, Mr. Magellan01? Yes, well you see a few hundred years ago a fellow bearing the same name as you dumped a pile of garbage off the coast of South America, we’d like to ask you a few questions about your own waste management habits.”
By the way, I menat to commend you on your cosistency with the choice of trains.
Regarding this, ahhhh, headway. So it is okay to use phsical characteristics in looking for a paricualr suspect(s) if the crime is already committed. So “profiling” is not the problem, but “preventive profiling”. So if a 20ish middle eastern male is seen to have dropped a backpack and run away, and backpack is filled with explosives, it would be okay to profile 20ish middle-eastern men, right? But why? To return his backpack? No, to prevent him from getting another backpack and carrying out a future assault. Does it change things if the first backpack just had a books in it (legal) about making bombs and how Muslims must kill westerners?
So, here, we DON’T have that situation. But it’s not as if the threat of suicide bombers doesn’t exist. And it’s not as if one group is more likely to be responsible for a bombing if it happens. I think you’d agree that we should be taking some steps to prevent what might very well be inevitable. So why not have profiling on the table, to be used—ornot—as a particular situation may dictate?
(5) Suppose you’re a profileable terrorist, ie, a 17-to-40-year-old arab male. You have hatched a plot to destroy jetliners by smuggling aboard bombs in a pet carrier. You have analyzed the plot from start to finish, and your honest estimation is that you have about a 50% chance of success. But then, one day, you learn that the government has started profiling. Now, the government still does all the normal searches on non-profiled types, just a little less thoroughly, but does a MUCH more thorough search on the profiled. So, your probability of success has now dropped to 25%. But if you were a young blonde woman, your probability of success would be 65%. Ahh, you think, all I need to do is recruit a young blonde woman and hey, presto, my probability of success will actually INCREASE! Foolish American running dogs!
But, and here’s the rub, how easy is it to recruit a young blonde woman who is willing and able to knowingly carry a bomb on board a jetliner? Who do you talk to? Who do you trust? Where do you advertise? Remember, much of your strength up until now has come from the fact that you and your brethren are fanatically loyal to a cause, very trustworthy, and very hard to infiltrate. The moment you start trying to recruit outsiders, you risk:
-word of the recruitment leaking back to the authorities
-recruiting someone who is actually an undercover cop
and/or
-recruiting someone who, not being a fanatic with a death wish, won’t have the nerve/capability to actually go through with the plan.
Thus, even if we’re VERY generous and say that you have a 50% chance of successfully recruiting a blonde woman who will successfully carry out your plan to fatal completion, the total probability of success of your endeavor is now only 50% times 65%, or 37.5%.
Now, obviously, I’m making all these numbers up. But my argument is valid as long as the decrease in security between the no-profiling-at-all-case and the non-profiled in the profiling case is less than the overall difficulty of terrorists recruiting a non-profiled person. If there were a huge untapped pool of fanatical blonde white-looking muslim extremists just WAITING to become terrorists, then profiling would truly be idiotic. But that’s NOT the case.
Who said anything about right and wrong? I’m just saying that if your argument is “it’s the wrong thing to do, and it wouldn’t work anyhow”, then you need to do a MUCH better job of supporting the second half of that.
Yeah, nab him. Because if the backpack is full of explosives then he’s a SPECIFIC Homo Sapiens and he has done a SPECIFIC act worthy of apprehension and maltreatment. If the backpack is full of Bomb-making manuals, the Koran, Bin Laden’s manifesto and sundry jihad propaganda, then yeah, nab HIM and inquire as to his intentions–just as you would if you identified these items in the posession of a clean cut blue-eyed honorably discharged US Marine.
Because it’s unconstitutional, and the constitution has not been amended to make such a policy OK. And because racial profiling has been shown in the past to result in attempted genocide whereas comparable numbers of lives SAVED by it are not forthcoming. I think it’s a much more DANGEROUS policy, long term, than it is useful. Because it’s another bite out of the personal liberties that were on the minds of a bunch of visionaries in the 18th Century. I’m all about changing the Consitution when necessary, but I’m also all about doing it in the prescribed way. This shoot-from-the-hip because we don’t have time for proper debate & legislation crap is extremely dangerous to our way of life–moreso than the occasional bomblet.
No I don’t. I’ve got the 4th Amendment which calls it “the wrong thing to do” because it’s an unreasonable search (This I suppose is a matter of debate, but I’m firmly convinced I’m right:) ). Therefore, the onus is on those who support racial profiling to prove that it WILL be effective. Then Change the Constitution accordingly. Then legislate the solution if they can do so with the support of the congress (and therefore The People).
Oh yeah… Fuck you, magellan01, and your mother, MaxTheVool with a filthy unlubricated 9-inch turquoise acryllic jelly dong.
(this was beginning to look too much like a GD thread)
How do we find out that the profile has failed? IMO, only by its catastrophic failure. Only when it has been exploited, at the cost of lives, can the profile be invalidated, and by that point it is already too late.
Again, I would recast the question: in making the profile more apt to the present threat, how many lives have been lost?
I quite agree, and this is the crux of my point. I believe that exerting prior suspicion on a person based on little more than their appearance (and that is what we’re talking about) is sufficiently large a departure from my libertarian ideals that it requires a large proven benefit to justify. I believe that the rational argument I have presented against profiling’s efficacy is enough to demand hard data proving that profiling does in fact bring a concrete benefit. If such data is obtained, then I must weigh my ideals against pragmatic considerations. As it stands, I tend to be told that profiling is “common sense”, or that it “stands to reason”. I dispute both, and believe that the onus is on those who would institute profiling to provide proof that their approach is a valid one.
Well, for starters I don’t believe that these points form a particularly coherent logical sequence (for example, point 2 elides a great deal of logical steps which I dispute), but here goes:
- Granted, of course.
- Disputed, for the reasons outlined in my earlier post. If we could accurately assess the current likelihood of a given group attacking at any point, I would concur, but I believe that our fundamental inability to do so is at the core of the profiling debate. Moreover, I believe that our profiling directly affects said likelihood, which is a factor we can never hope to control.
- Of course; this is pretty much the core of my argument.
- Again, yes, with the caveat that our profiling data will inevitably be reactive, and thus one step behind.
- Yep.
- Absolutely, and this is where I think the profiling argument becomes cloudy; many of the things you might consider “profiling” I consider basic detective work. It is the a priori definition of someone as a suspect based on their ethnicity/appearance/religion which I believe is both counter-productive and counter to some of our most treasured ideals, and it against this that I am arguing.
- No, I disagree. It represents both a challenge and an opportunity, in the same way as a locked gate presents a challenge to the stupid and a golden opportunity for the locksmith. Given that terrorists have a proven ability to exploit offered weaknesses, I think this comes right back to point 3. We cannot assume that our opponents are too stupid to notice the gifts we offer them.
- Granted, but I don’t think it’s been demonstrated that profiling makes things more difficult for terrorists.
- Granted of course, but again I don’t think it’s been demonstrated that profiling does in fact impede the determined terrorist.
Yes. You are very obviously making all of your numbers up. You are also presuming that
a) this purported terrorist is acting pretty much alone,
b) that there does not exist a world-wide network of terrorists who can actually look like a whole lot of different people (check out the photos of the various hijackers and bombers some time - even if you do ignore all the white criminals, see if you can come up with a useful profile),
c) that there’s no way of changing a particular person’s appearance (hello, Michael Jackson),
d) that a terrorism participant has to be knowledgeable of the fact (for instance, not all the 9/11 hijackers are believed to have known that they were on a suicide mission),
e) that Islamic terrorism is all we’re concerned with, and that
f) our putative terrorists are too stupid to notice our profile and exploit it,
and many more besides. But hey; by all means, accuse me of naivety. I notice you didn’t actually dispute any of my five points, but chose instead to reiterate the basic “it’s common sense” argument, ignoring any of the repercussions of your policy. Have you heard of the theory that you can’t observe something without changing it? It’s remarkably apposite here.