No shifting involved. Again,I refer you to my previous posts.
You want the criteria that the intelligence services might use? how about travel patterns, points of origin, known associates, political affiliation, business and educational background, etc etc. no skin colour involved but I’m sure you can see how, based on those criteria, a greater proportion of people from certain ethnic group, or countries, or religions may be scrutinised more closely.
After all, tongue-in-cheek you mentioned Inuits as being excluded from scrutiny. I suggest you examine why you said that. When you understand why they would be under-represented, you’ll understand why other groups would be over-represented.
I communicate for a living. I may have many faults but lack of clarity (or racism) is not one of them.
I just had a recent experience, going through airport security in Las
Vegas, seeing my wife held back in a glass enclosure while she frantically was trying to get my attention to watch her stuff. I was so stunned that the idea I needed to watch her stuff initially escaped me.
She was chosen for a random pat down.
Look, my wife is a grandmother who just couldn’t hurt a fly.
Me, on the other hand with once having held a blasting ticket and blown up several million tons of rock with Anfo and high explosives got through no problem.
I tell you, over 90% of travellers can be ruled out as terrorists by just looking at them. At the time, I judged all the people going through while I sat waiting for my wife, just waiting foir someone to ring a bell.
I’m not one of them.
My wife is. If you disagree and you were there , you are an idiot.
If someone arouses suspicion of capability or inclination, that should be checked out. But please, give even the low paid security agents some basic respect for being able to exclude people from being agents of threat.
It ain’t rocket science.
Those terrorists that rely on deception by attempting to look like innocents are really a joke. It only takes a few seconds of conversation to allow body language to conflict with the spoken word. That is why the Israeli method is so successful.
I don’t expect worldwide security to be able to adopt Israeli methods, but I would like and expect that TSA agents should be allowed to rule out individuals as threats based on some measure of positive profiling.
I suggest you actually look at Al Quedas recruitment pattern and where they have actually carried out their attacks and who they used to carry out their attacks. Of course, you refuse to do this. It’s clear you don’t even have an inkling about what Al Queda is or who is involved in Al Queda, so I don’t think I need to be lectured by you about who will be over or underrepresented.
Ok, here you are saying you can rule out 90% of the people based on looks alone. What is the criteria for judging people on their looks?
Then you shift to talking about conversational/behavioral profiling. That’s not the same as profiling based on looks alone. This is exactly what the advocates of profiling have been doing in this thread. Act as if they are solely speaking about behavioral or other types of profiling, while at the same time promoting racial or appearance-based profiling (you didn’t explicitly mention race, to your credit, but you have mentioned appearance). If you are going to advocate for appearance-based profiling, then I want to hear the criteria that’s going to be used.
Would you like me to post pictures of young blonde blue eyed male AND female American terrorists? I think YOU are the one who either knows about homegrown terrorism by Americans who visually look identical for screening purposes to your wife, or you are ignorant about who is comitting terrorism and yet you still have an opinion.
There is no “terrorist” look. And if there was, with Al Qaida’s adaptability, it would soon be exploited by the shoddy racist screening practices being espoused in this thread.
I notice also that no one is acknowledging my point earlier that increasing security on passengers and their luggage effectively increases American safety ZERO percent because that is not where the American gaps in security are. The next terrorist attack will NOT be taking place on a commercial airliner, so why are we willing to be probed and groped by TSA, and bring out the ugliest racist policies, when it will NOT increase safety???
I hate to donthis, but it has gotten to the point that I can’t stand it any more – it’s al Qaida, not al Queda. It rhymes with “hi there” not “hey there.”
Actually, since there are no more than a handful of terrorist events involving aircraft worldwide in a decade, much less a year, seems to me that a relatively efficient system would rule out about 99.9999% of all travelers. But hey: if we accept your 10% figure, how many passengers is that?
It seems that for the past several years combined US domestic and international boardings have hovered around 800 million per year. This would mean that the notional profiling scheme some are proposing here would require screening of at least 80 million people yearly to find, what, 2 or 3 potential terrorists? Hey, let’s say maybe 80 terrorists, even though that figure is almost certainly far too high. So, profiling is basically a million to one shot, and I’m willing to bet that the built-in inefficiencies of such scheme will deny boarding to thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of people who are no threat to anyone but don’t happen to look or sound right to the profiler.
BTW, for everyone going on about how wonderful the Israeli profiling system is: any idea how many false positives it generates? I didn’t think so.
Ok, so crappy as it is likely to be, profiling sounds, to some, more attractive than the current system, which attempts to screen nearly everyone who boards a plane for the same ridiculously small number of potential threats. It’s still wildly inefficent by any measure, and, just like the current system, turns presumption of innocence on its head, just now for some unfortunate, sloppily-defined subset of one group or another, instead of pretty much everybody. Sorry, I’m not overly impressed, especially since no here has yet defined how this profiling scheme would work, other than targeting people who ‘look muslim’ or ‘look Arab’ and, presumably, allowing TSA access to some gigantic Echelon-style NSA database. Are you sure that’s what you want? Are you sure I and my fellow citizens want to throw bundles of my tax dollars at it?
However, in the cases of both the readership of Ms. Collins and potential terrorists, a decent profile could achieve the correct results without including either the sex of the former or the ethnicity of the latter.
After a proper profiling had collected enough suspects, we might very well discover that more women were readers and more terrorists were from the Middle East, but a good profile, (based on behavior, not on flimsy judgment calls regarding ethnicity), should identify the suspects just as thoroughly–or more thoroughly than–wasting time and missing potential evil-doers by looking at sex or skin shades.
I have no problem with effective profiling.
I think that short-hand profiling based on perceived ethnicity is stupid and counterproductive.
Do you seriously read what you are responding to ?
I just told you that I, blue eyed and good looking shouldn’t be overlooked as a possible terrorist.
To repeat, all I’m saying is that it is easy and fair enough to rule most people out.
And yes, to add, behaviorial responses, body language and appearance all go into the mix in order to rule out people as candidates for suspicion of terrorism.
Just justify a pat down on a three year old to me.
Easy, a mass murdering terrorist is willing to use their, or someone else’s baby to hide bomb materials.
This thread is about RACIAL PROFILING, so if you are not going to spell out your system beyond “I’s knows one when I see’s one”, I’m going to rightfully assume you are talking about profiling BY RACE unless you say so. And you would easily get your claimed 90% rate because terrorists are far less than 1% of air travellers, so all you would achieve is hassling minorities based on looks. Congratulations, you can sleep at night, while accomplishing nothing.
Again, would you please respond to why we should profile middle easterners or muslims more when airport security isn’t even a problem? How many cargo containers do you think come into this country every day that are not inspected? How many water reservoirs have no security?
Security in a nation as huge as this is a complete and utter fallacy, so giving away our civil rights and right to fair and speedy trial in exchange for security theatre is ludicrous, this topic shouldn’t even exist.
He was caught based on communications with Muslim terrorist groups which probably involved eavesdropping in one form or another. given the shitstorm over NSA surveillance I’d say a lot of people have a problem with it.
The problem is that some people seem to have is that the “correct result” may end up dealing with a disproportionate amount of people with certain characteristics.
Well I never mentioned Al Qaida, you did. If you are making a claim regarding Al Qaida operatives then feel free to do so.
However I do know it is not a formal organisation so it would be difficult to consider that it had a central strategy for recruitment. It is a shared idea with shadowy figureheads and local cell structuring. It takes root wherever there is dissatisfaction amongst Muslims and antipathy to the west and it’s allies.
Certainly it tries to radicalise and recruit in the western nations as that makes good operational sense, the cover is stronger the subterfuge more complete and it is one less level of complication when planning attacks.
They will gladly take white, middle aged, english women as new recruits if they can get them.
Are you suggesting that this is now the case?
If it helps, try this on for size.
Imagine that the security services develop a satellite system that could sweep the globe and magically show up Al Qaida activists as blue dots.
The system isn’t racist, it doesn’t look at skin colour or any other criteria apart from detecting “Al Qaida-ness”.
Would those blue dots be evenly distributed? Would there be any clusters? Would there be any common factors, features or criteria that many of those activists share?
In other words, were all those blue dots to be rounded up and paraded in front of you do you think any community, ethnicity, religion or area will be over or under-represented?
I am sure certain groups would be more predominant. It would be the same if we had a similar system to identify all criminals. That does not mean because some groups are more represented and yet still represent a very small minority of those groups that we have the right to target those groups in any way.
A car is stolen in the proximity of a very well-to-do neighbourhood and a particularly notorious one. To get the most from your tax dollar, where do you recommend the police start looking?
A burglary occurs and saliva is left behind, you identify 400 people who could’ve done it and you have enough money to DNA the 200 men only, the 200 women only or a 50/50 mix…what do you suggest?
An intercept leads you to uncover a group of hardline Muslim activists in Somalia who represent a danger.
Does that mean you restrict your intelligence activities to them? Do you follow the links to other countries even though you know you’ll end up mainly investigating mostly Somalis?
By your logic, the intelligence services should start anew each time.
How do you balance your admirable wish for a world in which all are equal with the real world of finite resources and asymmetric threats?
By looking for evidence. Certainly not by harassing a whole neighborhood.
You can’t check the DNA of a whole group like that in either case. It would be illegal.
Obviously you follow up on your leads and seek more evidence to narrow it down.
You realize in all of your examples you never came close to the ratios we are dealing with in terms of terrorist and yet they are still unacceptable intrusions into innocent peoples lives.
As described above. As police do it now. Seek evidence as opposed to a whole group is discriminated against based on some similarity with a very small minority of that group that who are a danger.