I eagerly await your explanation of how applying heightened surveillance to nearly three million people in the US alone, of whom only a tiny and statistically insignificant minority pose any kind of security threat to anybody, would have the effect of “avoiding unnecessary bullshit”.
Or perhaps you fondly imagine that such a policy would simply result in avoidance of “unnecessary bullshit” for you personally. That is, you picture yourself breezing through airport security with no hassles, while the people subjected to long lines and annoying restrictions and intrusive scrutiny would be merely various dark-complexioned strangers in turbans and headscarves, whose comfort and convenience and privacy are of course unimportant.
If that’s the case, I pity your clueless naivete almost more than I despise your selfish prejudice.
Exactly. People seem to think that Muslims are a tiny group, all of whom basically agree. Profiling people for being Muslim will only justifiably offend them, harass innocent people, and won’t narrow your targets enough to be remotely useful anyway. A “short list” of millions isn’t short.
If they attend a Mosque. If they dress a certain way. There are a lot of ways to tell if someone is a Muslim. If someone who is a Muslim doesn’t fit the profile then the profile won’t work for that person, obviously. But that’s not what profiling is for.
It will narrow down the search criteria. Instead of searching old white ladies, we can narrow it to young Muslim men and reduce the load on TSA quite a bit.
Who said heightened surveillance? There is lots of consumer data available that can be used to build a profile. DHS has access to that data. The argument against profiling just says that they aren’t allowed to use the data effectively, that they aren’t allowed to build analytic profiles in a meaningful way.
Maybe people are confused as to what ‘profiling’ means. You don’t even need to tap someone’s phone to build a profile on them. Acxiom prides itself on having more than 1000 datapoints on every person in the United States. They used to claim that they had more data on 95% of the population than the FBI or the CIA. This is probably true.
For me and for everyone who doesn’t fit the profile of a terrorist. You don’t even need to hold someone back at the TSA for very long to do an effective profile. You can use the data that the government ALREADY HAS to more effectively profile people. And the computers would only need to be running analytics on anyone who is flying that day. That’s a significantly smaller portion than 3,000,000 people. See that? One of the profile data points would be, “Flying today”. You’ve already narrowed your search criteria immeasurably. You can also give supervisors a greater understanding of how profiling works, and train them to ask specific questions. You might not have to detain any individual for more than five minutes. The people who ARE selected out of the queue for special treatment can be moved to the front of their own queue, and even if not, they won’t need to wait behind an endless stream of people disassembling strollers, taking of shoes, or whatever. It might actually result in FASTER service.
LOL. I’m the one whose naive and yet you’re the one who doesn’t really understand how a profile works. You’re profiled every single day by many organizations public and private. The issue isn’t with whether or not you are profiled, it’s with how that information is used.
Muslim males between 17 and 40, as he said above. The basic fact of the matter is that terrorist hijackings are the exclusive purview of Muslim terrorists.
Google analytics, Digital River and Acxiom profile you all day long and I don’t hear you crying about it, but get someone to suggest that a data point that applies to EVERY SINGLE hijacker be used by such analytics and suddenly I am some kind of bigot.
And the moment you do that, it will occur to them to plant a bomb on an old white woman, or hire an old white woman to plant one, or blackmail one, or something of the sort. Or one of the other categories that aren’t “young Muslim man”. It’s not like no one has ever used strategies like planting a bomb in a pregnant woman’s luggage because she won’t be suspected.
Following your plan doesn’t make us safer; on the contrary, it pretty much gives the next bunch of terrorists with any brains at all a free success. You might as well put up signs telling them how to get past security.
You seem to be the confused one. In this context, profiling refers to targeting particular groups for law enforcement scrutiny, especially security screening (e.g. at airports). It does not refer to building dossiers on individuals.
Your idea that screening all these people for religious affiliation is somehow going to decrease the overall burden of security screening activities is absolutely ludicrous.
Who are, as I noted, a tiny and statistically insignificant minority of all Muslims. The point of profiling is to detect characteristics in individuals that correlate in a STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT way with dangerous activities.
Being an Islamist-terror hijacker is statistically an extremely strong indicator of being Muslim, but the converse is not true. Merely being Muslim does not correlate in any meaningful way with being a terrorist hijacker, just as being a Sikh does not correlate in any meaningful way with being a terrorist hijacker, despite the fact that there have been several instances of Sikhs hijacking planes.
In other words: Yes, all Islamist terrorists are Muslims. However, very very very few Muslims are Islamist terrorists. It is stupid and inefficient to subject large numbers of people to heightened scrutiny based on a shared characteristic that is statistically meaningless as an indicator of terrorist tendencies.
Because rationally, it doesn’t make any more sense than, say, suggesting that everybody over 5’3" be profiled, on the grounds that that data point also applies to EVERY SINGLE hijacker.
People who advocate such stupid and pointless policies specifically directed at Muslims do tend to be either “some kind of bigot”, or else just too scared to be thinking clearly.
It sure would be a lot easier if the government maintained some sort of list for mosque attendance. And it’d sure put my concerns at rest if we could have an easy way to identify mosque-goers for TSA screenings, for example maybe having them all dress a certain way, like some sort of colorful patch they’d have to wear on their jacket at all times. Surely we can all agree this is only a small price to pay in the name of security.
LOL, and they’ll give her an Invisible Pink Unicorn to ride to the airport.
LOL, silly. Using Muslim as a profile data point doesn’t mean that there aren’t any other profile data points used.
Except that’s how I am using it. So perhaps you didn’t read what you responded to. I’ll refrain from responding further so you can go back an re-read what I wrote.
Ok, lets narrow it down. Male: 2m becomes 1m. Between the ages of 17 and 40. 1m becomes about 350k (rough estimate). Muslim 350k becomes 3500. See how that works? That’s the magic of profiling! It allows you to reduce significant populations quickly!
I’m not talking about having the TSA at the gate build a profile right then and there. I am talking about having the DHS supercomputers analyzing all sorts of SigInt data that has been collected and quantifying risk assessments on individual passengers. As such religious affiliation should be a data point. It’s not like, it’s going to be, ZOMG, Muslim = Terrorist! For the most part the process will be opaque to the traveller because the analytic process will be run in the background.
Right, and that’s why you use broad criteria and narrow it further. IE, Flying today, Sex, Age Cohort, Religious Affiliation. Those data points narrow the search criteria for a particular cohort significantly, as I said above 2m becomes 3500 across the entire country. After that data points can be used to eliminate people. IE, Travelling with family, can eliminate any Muslim between the ages of 17 and 40 because Muslims generally don’t bring their young sons and daughters on suicide bombing missions.
Except you’re treating it as though we are only going to analyze one particular data point. This is hardly the case. We’d be analyzing thousands of data points on every single individual flying in a given day.
But we aren’t subjecting large numbers. We are subjecting small numbers. 3500 or so per day to increased scrutiny. This scrutiny does not have to be obvious and in your face to the particular passengers and other data points can be used to eliminate the problem. As the only thing the profile does is indicate a need for extra attention by the TSA, they might merely be flagged for an interview or for a more intensive search, which they already do anyway. So instead of making EVERYONE take off their shoes, we only make 1 out of every thousand or more take off their shoes.
It makes more sense than random searches.
No, I’m not scared at all. Terrorism doesn’t scare me, and I’m not some kind of bigot. But I like your use of your Junior Profiling kit.
But they could take the patch off. Surely a tattoo would provide greater security, and if it could save just one life, would be worth the minor inconvenience.
Emphasis added. Wow, this idea appears to be even stupider than I first realized. So you are suggesting foregoing ALL routine screening procedures such as shoe checks for ALL airline passengers, EXCEPT the small percentage of passengers who are Muslim males between 17 and 40?
Do you really imagine that terrorist organizations won’t easily see how to turn such a shortsighted policy to their own advantage?
Profiling is not limited to law enforcement. You have a ‘profile’ on this message board for instance.
In this instance, we are talking about Law Enforcement.
Now do you want to try and catch me engaging in more instances of your poor reading comprehension or did you have a point you were going to make?
Heh, the government has a lot of data on you that you likely are totally unaware of. Have you made any donations to your church that you then declared to the IRS for a charitable tax deduction for instance? If so then the IRS has data on that.
Have you made any cell phone calls from the church parking lot? If you have then the NSA has data on that.
You are suggesting I said anything remotely resembling what you just said above and then claiming that, I am stupid?
You’re clearly not interested in having a debate about this. You want your liberal outrage validated. They stamp your ticket for that on your way out. I’m not here for emotional validation.
Hardly shortsighted. This is the long view. This is how to keep a multiethnic globalized polity safe in the information age. It’s called Signals Intelligence and is used by every single intelligence agency in the world. The idea that we should not use religious affiliation as a criteria in building profiles is silly nonsense.
Eh, put down the Tom Clancy novel. Do you have a cite that the gov’t has compiled lists of religious institutions people have donated money to or made phone calls from.
No, but I didn’t claim that they did. I said the government has data and that they should be analyzing that data to build profiles using specific data points, and that religious affiliation should not be limited from the criteria.
What I am saying right now is that they should be putting the raw data to use.
