I knew you were going to bring up the 4th Amendment, but in the case of airline travel, it does not apply. Airplane transportation is not a right, its a contract between an individual and a private corporation. As part of that contract, you already consent to being searched prior to being allowed to board the plane, and at any time during your trip. If you feel that your particular group is being unfairly targeted for numerous searches, then don’t fly.
Furthermore, what you seem to be overlooking in your hypothetical scenario of a terrorist leader shopping at Bombers backwards R Us (Hmmm, the Great Satan is looking for swarthy men, today I’ll pick my bombers from the blue eyed Arian women’s section) is that suicide bombers are NOT that widely available. Terrorists? Sure. And group that you care to name, racial, ethnic, religious, etc… is perfectly capable of producing terrorists. Suicide bombers are another matter. It requires a peculiar mix of cultural and religious beliefs to generate a pool of people to draw from for whom suicide bombing is seen as a sensible, even desirable and noble occupation. Right now the largest such pool of people happen to be predominantly Fundamentalist Islamic Arabs. This is also the group of people who have stated their intention to launch such attacks against the Western world. Refusing to take a close look at people who meet that description is fundamentally absurd. This is not to say that profiling should be the only, or even the primary, method used when looking for terrorists, but it does have it’s place. Other methods should be used at the same time to try and catch those people who do not fit the profile. Denying the obvious just so we can congratulate ourselves on how wonderful and PC we are is not just stupid, it’s dangerous.
Well that’s GREAT news! Because I’ve always wanted to open a department store but never did because those damned niggers would come in and steal my goods. But I can’t post a sign at the door saying “Whites Only” anymore (oh…the good old days) so I’d have to let THEM in too. Even if I didn’t carry their kind of clothing, they’d still come in and cause trouble–by any means necessary. But if I institute a policy of, upon entry & departure of my stores, frisking the customers then I can reduce the incidence of shoplifting. And since I already know that the niggers are the ones who’ll steal from me (as evidenced by the vastly greater number of colored inmates) I’ll frisk each and every one of THEM in addition to other customers who look like they’d not be My Sort of Client. And this will be perfectly legal because this frisking policy will be posted as a condition of entry into my store.
Well, you have sarcasm down. Do you have anything of substance to add? Do you actually have any knowledge at all of the subject at hand (have you ever read the purchase agreement you agree to when buying an airline ticket, for example), or are you just happy to have something else to feed your need to be offended?
I don’t think I’m assuming (f) at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. (More on your points (a) through (e) later in this post.)
That said, I’m not trying to make some airtight argument of any sort. I’m not saying “I know with absolute certainty that it’s possible to do X Y and Z types of profiling which will reduce terrorism W amount”. Rather, I’m disputing the claim that you and Inigo are making, which is that profiling will not work. I don’t think any of us know IF profiling will work. But I claim that it MIGHT work.
Thus, my argument is not that it is impossible for a terrorist to get someone who doesn’t fit the profile, but that doing so is not a gimme. That is, doing so is hard enough that it will reduce the success of the mission, by either:
-limiting (although not reducing to zero) the pool of available suicide bombers
or
-making the suicide bombers more easily detectable
I will do so now
So, reading all of my posts in this thread, they just add up to “it’s common sense”? Really?
Why, yes I have, and thank you for the condescension… I will touch on it briefly as I address your five points:
Agreed. Note, however, that if the first group is much smaller than the second group, you can incrase the security on the first group by a LOT while decreasing it on the other group by only a little.
Agreed.
Not necessarily. For instance, the profiling might kick in as an automated background check when tickets are purchased. But in general, yes. Or physical characteristics might just be one of many characteristics that an expert system uses to determine whether any individual would get extra searching… people who purchased tickets in specific ways, or who are or are not travelling alone, or who are sitting in particular places, or have particular previous airline ticket purchasing histories, all might or might not deserve extra scrutiny. Beats me.
Agreed. Note, however, that these can change over time. People who know far more about the issue than either you or I, ie, people who actually study terror for a living, will be qualified to judge what characteristics, if any, are worth profiling for.
Here’s where we disagree. And I explained why at great length. And you accused me of just using the “common sense” argument. Anyhow, to repeat myself, (5) is only true if costs the terrorists NOTHING in terms of time and effort and security to have their suicide bombers be unprofileable. As long as evading the profiling makes the terrorists lives more difficult, than the profiling MAY be succesful in increasing overall security. Whether it IS or not depends on exactly how hard it is for them to evade the profiling compared to exactly how much of a drop in security there is for the non-profiled. And those are two data points that, as of right now, we don’t have, which is why I was making up numbers in my last post, which was to show that it was plausible that profiling might work, which is why I was disagreeing with you and Inigo in the first place.
As for your points (a) through (e), well, I agree, you’ve demonstrated that profiling wouldn’t be ONE HUNDRED PERCENT EFFECTIVE. Well, who claimed that it would? Yes, terrorists could work around it. But as long as they’ve having to work around it, they are SPENDING EFFORT WORKING AROUND IT, and they are HAVING TO DO THINGS THAT MAKE THEIR SCHEMES MORE RISKY. Thus, it is PLAUSIBLE, although NOT SOMETHING I HAVE PROVED, that the profiling might overall make it more difficult for terrorists to blow up airplanes.
As an example, if the terrorists’ whole scheme depends on the bombers not knowing that they are suicide bombers, as you correctly pointed out happened on 9/11, then the terrorists could more easily recruit blonde women, but there would be other constraints that this limitation placed on the plan as a whole, and so forth.
9/11 was able to happen because the FBI didn’t want to follow up on reports of people learning to fly big planes who didn’t want to bother to learn how to land. Now, you want to talk about profiling for behavior, that would be a starting point. But because the FBI ignored that, we now have a national discussion about profiling swarthy males.
Every one of you who says you would be glad to be thoroughly strip-searched every time you get on a plane if only it would advance the cause of security for your fellow Americans may actually be telling the truth, but I bet you that after the tenth time of watching much more suspicious looking white guys waltz through the checkpoints with a wink and nod, you would start to feel the sting of the injustice.
Take London as an example. Twice in a couple of weeks attacks were made on its transport system, the eight perpetrators of which fitted a specific profile.
If a further attack were made next week and those who carried it out were found also to fit the profile (which, I think most here would agree, would be more than likely), the police would be (rightly) chastised if they had allocated an equal amount of finite resources on checking blonde, nordic-looking women as they had on checking swarthy, middle-eastern looking men in the interim.
It should also be remembered that the lives potentially saved would belong to people of all races, colours and creeds.
Those bent on terror may one day manage to recruit blonde, nordic women for their missions, but it would be stupid to assume that scenario a likely one at the moment, when recent evidence suggests those fanatic enough to blow themselves up almost exclusively belong to one specific grouping.
Well no. Some are middle eastern, some are clearly african, one could pass himself for white with minimal effort. Are you basically saying, as Muslims are also to be found by the hundreds of millions in Asia, that the profile is non-white (while praying that none of them pesky white Muslims from Chechnya or eastern europe are around)?
Besides it is so patently bloody obvious it shouldn’t need pointing out. Raise security one place and they’ll just target another. What you going to do? Search every non white under 50 going into a sports stadium, supermarket, theatre, cinema, restaurant or walking down a crowded street? And as people keep pointing out, to no apparent avail. A nice long queue of people waiting to be search in the underground station concourse is just a way to concentrate victims for more effective killing.
Jeez - we’re meant to have some bloody backbone, not make a bonfire of our values and liberties and grant the police the right to summarily execute people on suspicion just out of fear and still not be one little bit safer.
Thank God Churchill and our grandparents had more guts than this.
It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to work out that profiling can be used in a much more sophisticated way than mere stop and search operations.
The point is to try to prevent future attacks – attacks unlikely to be perpetrated, as yet, by our blonde, nordic ladies.
If you are referring to WWII, didn’t they use a profile of people wearing German, Italian or Japanese military uniforms?
Churchill and your grandparents interned over 2000 Germans living in Britain for most of the war and put them in camps, after first interning, for short periods, most of those Germans in Britain.
Churchill and your grandparents also imposed censorship and imprisoned people who opposed the war for sedition.
Mr. Churchill says, “We gotta hold up our chins,
gotta show some courage and discipline.
So black out the windows and nail up the doors
and keep right on til the end of the war.” (–Kinks)
(wandering away from the subject at hand…) It occurs to me that terrorists who target civilians do so with a purpose. It’s not to topple the government directly, or else we’d be seeing politicians and governemnt structures targeted. It’s not a true war because, well, at the rate they’re killing their enemies they’ll be figting this thing well into the next 10,000 years. It’s not a war against Christianity because they don’t seem interested in blowing up churches or clergy.
It’s got to be about something else. Nobody, no matter how fanatical, is going to blow himself up just to say “BOO!” So really the only point that I can see to terrorism in general is to destabilize the government by shaking the trust of the people who support it.
That’s one thing I really like about the little I know about Churchill–he seems to have been effective at uniting people against an aggressor. Same for FDR for that matter: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” I know Dubya came right out and called this a “war against freedom” but he never explained why he thought that. But as this thing wears on I see that we are indeed LOSING this war because every time we sacrifice a little chunk of our free-range lifestyle we cede another ideological victory to The Bad Guys.
For every policy we accept that, without due process as described in The Constition:
allows protesters to be cordoned off to non-visible sites (amendment 1)
allows restricted access to firearms (amendment 2)
allows the discriminatory search of people based on ethnic/racial criteria (amendment 4)
allows persons to be detained indefinitely without charge or indictment (amendment 5)
allows persons to be detained indefinitely without trial (amendment 6)
allows prisoners to be torured and humiliated (amendment 8)
…we are one step closer to living the same oppressed lifestyle that enjoys widespread popularity throughout the Middle East, especially such delightful places as Iran & Taliban Afghanistan. A direct rovoulution would result in unity against those who hate us. But we are so easily divided in the absence of strong and sensible leadership that, one by one, the freedoms that we hold dear, our future, the legacy for our posterity is being squandered on our desire for immediate security. We are so divided that we do not see a common goal or a common future, and so we don’t understand that once we give these freedoms up, we won’t get them back. We’re spending our childrens’ inheritance because we’re afraid of something that can’t kill a significant number of us. Nobody is willing to “take one forthe team” so “the team” is going to lose.
Fuckit. If there are so few of us left who can see that Freedom Ain’t Free, that some people are going to have to die if the rest of us are to live unoppressed, then maybe we all deserve to go back to the stone-age oppression our enemies have in mind for us.
Yes, because everyone who isn’t 100% anti-any-form-of-racial-profiling in all possible situations no matter how effective it might or might not be determined to be; clearly also supports the patriot act, wants the government to run the internet, and probably masturbates nightly to a pinup of Lynndie England.
Can you spot the key phrase? Yes it’s ‘at war’. A real, not a metaphorical war. Against a defined enemy. You know - the Blitz, millions of enemy troops poised to invade, massive destruction on a daily basis?
That also is so obvious it should not need pointing out.
Neither should that fact that, but apparently it needs to be, armed police weren’t roaming the streets shooting people that looked vaguely teutonic and acting suspiciously.
Your points, in short, are irrelevant as the two situations are in no way, shape, form and scale, comparable.
You might try the current situation compared to The Troubles. Remember the disaster of Bloody sunday that boosted IRA recruitment into the stratosphere? Remember Internment that radicalised the nationalist population further and created martyrs while doing nothing to defeat the IRA?
Remember how the police went around hysterically fitting up the first irishmen they could lay their hands on for atrocities and so letting the real guilty parties free to strike again?
Remember how wearing a donkey jacket outside of a building site or ordering a pint of Guinness was reasonable grounds for summary execution?
And on the subject of grandparents. One of mine was on the beaches of Dunkirk and the other was in his small fishing boat hauling soldiers from the sea while being strafed. And I’m damn sure neither of them would be stampeding to give up the freedoms they fought for because a tiny group of exteremists managed, 2 years after the provacative event to kill less people that a single V1 would manage day after day.
With all due respect to those that died and their families - the threat is not anything like severe enough to throw away hard won freedoms and certainly not enough to justify crude profiling for potential summary execution.
That will just make things worse by further radicalising a segment of the population already dangerously alienated and so breed more terrorists pissed off enough to kill.
We need to seperate extremists from sympathy not alienate them and as profiling for searches of customers at stations will not save one life and as we’ve already seen, sucks resources away from other policing areas to flood the Underground with police, there are no grounds for supporting it.
The alternative to not doing something that is stupidly counter-productive is not to do nothing, it is to do something effective with the resources. And doing nothing is better than doing something stupid.
And all this chicken-livered hysteria is not just counter-productive, it plays into Fundamentalist hands. I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m sick of us dancing to OBL’s tune.
“Hate our freedoms eh? Well, we’ll make a bonfire of 'em. That’ll teach you. Say the West is on a crusade against Islam? Well, attacking Iraq on blatantly false pretexts should really give the lie to that!” :rolleyes:
tagos, your hysteria is overwhelming. Profiling basically means looking in what is likely to be the direction from which the next attack will come. Being as prepared as possible is not “giving away all our freedoms”.
Having rude and insensitive police officers hassle people of a certain proifile means you have rude and insensitive police officers not that profiling is neccessarily an invidious erosion of a society’s freedoms.
Yes, certain countries have had to adapt to counter terrorist attacks – that’s not letting them win so much as acting to deter or defeat them. I’m sure Churchill and your grandfathers would have been all in favour of doing something rather than nothing.
(–Kinks)