Yes aside from the morality and legality I am not sure how you would even go about implementing religious profiling. Is this some database of Muslim names that the government develops? Like I said how hard would it be a for terrorist just to change his name. And if profiling means that people with non-Muslim names receive less scrutiny it could actually make it easier for a terrorist to pass through. The whole idea is absurd, really.
Yes, I understand signal to noise ratios. Is that your (very obscure) way of trying to say that you don’t actually think that screening procedures such as shoe checks really are completely useless, but rather that their usefulness shows up only when they’re limited to higher-risk passengers?
If so, then once again, if you advocate limiting routine screening procedures in such a way, how do you prevent this from becoming a security weak spot that terrorist organizations can take advantage of?
Well as this has already been answered and reiterated more than a dozen times. But I’ll try again.
It’s not a database of Muslim names. It’s a database of everyone, and religious affiliation is a possible datapoint.
Well yes, this is why this straw man is pointless. You’re right, you’ve knocked down the straw man effectively, just like everyone else. But that’s not what profiling is.
How does the government even obtain data on religious affiliation? Presumably a database of names of a particular religion. So my point still stands. And if profiling means anything it means that people identified as non-Muslim would receive less scrutiny. So any would-be terrorist who manages that not-very difficult feat would face less scrutiny than without profiling.
What database is this, exactly? How is information regarding religious affiliation obtained?
I don’t think that strip searches are completely useless no. I think that partial strip searches of every single person flying are useless, because it’s high noise, low signal. So yes, I am saying that their usefulness only shows up when they’re limited to high-risk passengers.
You can’t prevent that. There is no such thing as 100% security. But for the most part I don’t expect Muslim terrorists to be canny enough to outwit NSA analytics. If someone is so good at dissimulation that they are able to present a profile other than who they actually are, then you’re talking about a criminal mastermind. For the most part the criminal masterminds don’t blow themselves up, they have minions for that. If someone is brilliant enough to live a fully dissimulated existence, then it’s highly doubtful that they are going to waste themselves just to take down a single plane. Full dissimulation is very, very difficult.
Sure, criminals fly around on fake passports, it happens, but that’s not a reasonable counter-argument. ‘Some people might be able to thwart the more effective screening methods, so we should just stick with the pointlessly useless methods we have now instead.’
Two things have made us safe against another 9/11. Steel doors on the cockpit, and Signals Intelligence. At the end of the day it’s the Signals Intelligence that helps us find the terrorists. This Signals Intelligence uses profiling. They use it overseas to identify terrorist targets, but because of anti-discrimination fears in the US, we are not allowed to use it effectively to fight domestic terror. It’s completely irrational.
Terrorism isn’t going to go away. We aren’t going to be able to stop 100% of domestic terror attacks by any stretch of the imagination. But that doesn’t invalidate the techniques of profiling. Israel DOES profile on whether or not someone is a Muslim and El Al is one of the safest airlines in the world. Now of course we can’t implement Israel’s procedures simply because it’s logistically untenable. But that doesn’t mean we can’t look at their procedures and figure out what is scalable. Having the capability to narrow down suspect populations, is an incredibly powerful tool when working with very large numbers of people.
Established Constitutional limitations = (irrational) anti-discrimination fears. Curious.
There is no such database. I am talking about feeding raw data from various government agencies and creating a database. One can tell a lot of things about you based upon things like spending habits. And obviously one’s ethnic make-up has a high correlation to religiousity. Arabs are highly likely to be Muslims, pure and simple. Private industry does this kind of stuff all the time. Acxiom updates your marital status based on purchases you’ve made. If you buy a diamond ring for instance, that’s an indicator that you are getting married. If you hire a wedding planner, if you open a joint bank account, it tells them you are getting married. Yes, there’s a margin of error, but that’s beside the point.
The NSA monitors all electronic communication in the entire world with Project Echelon. It’s the most robust Signals Intelligence program in the entire world, with international participation in most of the anglosphere nations. So the NSA has access to your phone records already. If a database like I am referring to exists anywhere, it’s at the NSA. Cell phone conversations made regularly from the mosque parking lot for instance can indicate mosque attendance.
Actually, I think you’re making a mistake and I welcome a lawyer to correct me. But I don’t think that using religious affiliation as a datapoint qualifies as discrimination. There is also the fact of the matter that intelligence agencies are already doing this. It’s just a matter of how they utilize the data.
American Arabs are not highly likely to be Muslims. Only 24% are Muslim.
Obviously, non-American Arabs are much more likely to be Muslims, but I’d be very impressed to see the NSA or anyone else track the spending habits and telephone records of foreign nationals, even in friendly Arab states.
Oh. Well, to my thinking, that kind of puts a hole in your claim that this policy would improve security effectiveness.
That’s the problem. If they recruit a minion who doesn’t fit your typical high-risk profile, then your policy of restricting routine screening to people who match the high-risk profile has just made it a whole lot easier for the minion to succeed in his mission.
I don’t think that phrase means what you think it means. Signals intelligence or SIGINT, as I noted before, refers simply to the entire category of intelligence-gathering techniques that involve analyzing signals from communications, broadcast, and surveillance devices.
The type of intelligence gathering that you’re talking about (creating detailed profiles on individuals) depends heavily not only on signals intelligence but also on its counterpart called human intelligence or HUMINT, namely, collecting data by interpersonal contact. There’s absolutely no valid reason to restrict a profile database to data gathered only by signals intelligence.
Intelligence agencies may use profiling to gather evidence in cases where they have reason to believe a crime or conspiracy to commit a crime has occurred. Random or targeted passenger screenings at airports have no such reasonable cause - they are intended to prevent crimes or conspiracies which may occur.
“Using religious affiliation as a datapoint” is obviously not illegal. The government already collects information regarding religious affiliation in the census, among other ways.
Using religious affiliation as a basis for investigating someone is illegal, although there are certain allowances made for national security. There is also the fact that laws allegedly discriminating against citizens or legal resident aliens are subject to strict scrutiny, while those discriminating against nonresident or illegal aliens are not.
Aside from the fact as pointed out that US Arabs aren’t likely to be Muslims how would the government get data on who is Arab or not? And if you don’t directly have data on religious affiliation at all why bring it into the picture? And the arguments from the private sector aren’t relevant. For example people who are getting married don’t have any incentive to hide that fact. Terrorists have a strong incentive to change any behavioral pattern that is likely to identify them.
Anyway you haven't provided any information on how religious profiling would work let alone provide any evidence that religious profiling would add any value to other non-discriminatory profiling techniques. The costs of religious profiling in terms of alienating US Muslims is very clear. Unless proponents of such profiling can provide strong evidence that the benefits are large it remains an extremely foolish idea.Not at all. This is silly. The complete elimination of a terrorist threat is not a valid criteria for judging security methods.
You’re profiling the minion. Minions have profiles too. The likelihood that the minion will also thwart particular profiles is also fairly low.
Yes. I know what it means. I’m using it correctly. I am talking about how we analyze that data for a particular purpose.
We’re not talking about ‘restricting’ data. This is a straw man. I am talking simply about using signals intelligence to build profiles on passengers in real time. Where you get this ludicrous idea that this somehow tosses out Human Intelligence as a relevant factor makes no sense. The SigInt profile alerts the HumInt agents at the airport to the people who fit the profile to a certain degree. It’s a combination of the two. The personalized screening process occurs after SigInt has escalated to HumInt. Also, if you have the TSA on the ground less busy having people take their shoes off, you can train them in basic techniques building profiles based off of attitudinal interactions. Whether or not someone is being shifty and acting nervous in line. At which point they can be escalated up the food chain to increasingly trained supervisors who have access to more data on the individual.
A guy on another message board I spoke to is a screener at an airport. He said they are so tied up with useless things that they aren’t cognizant of the crowd, that no one is checking the crowd for people acting suspiciously because they are too busy handling shoes. On 9/11 there was a whole layer of people who mentioned that they specifically remembered a number of the hijackers and saying they did indeed look shifty. If those people at TSA who are interacting with every single passenger have a chance to observe people then the quality of the HumInt has been increased by the SigInt profile.
And that should obviously be taken into account in the profile.
You work with the data you have.
But no one has suggested that. I am not going to rebut this straw man.
Yes.
Except we already have different rules for how we interact with people at the airport.
I’m not going to answer this question again. You use the data you have access to. It’s that simple. If you know their ethnicity and religion then they should be datapoints in your profile.
There is no such thing as religious profiling. This is a straw man. I’m talking about profiling that includes religion as a data point.
So in the case of Arab-Americans, “the profile” is going to say, “possibly Muslim”? I’m sure this will be of incalculable assistance to law enforcement personnel and the TSA. Perhaps we could get Miss Cleo on the case - you are looking for a man who lives in an apartment, mon… but he also might not.
If you have no data at all, you don’t have much of a database, do you?
Wait, so you’re not suggesting that we improve airport security by singling out Muslim males for additional scrutiny? What are you suggesting then?
You haven’t answered this question at all. In what possible way are you going to know the ethnicity and religion of foreign nationals unless they tell you?
In what possible sense is that a straw man?
Profiling that includes religion as a data point is religious profiling. You haven’t provided any evidence that it adds to the effectiveness of non-discriminatory profiling let alone explain how this data would be collected given that terrorists would have a strong incentive to pose as non-Muslims.
No, I am talking about profiling in general. You’re trying to emphasize one data point arbitrarily. If they measure shoe size then is it also shoe-size profiling? What if they use gender? Is it gender profiling? What if it measures relative wealth, is it then classist profiling?
I find the idea that terrorists are masterminds who can outwit DHS SigInt to be an uncompelling argument.
mswas, excellent point. These people are blowing themselves up, they are by that alone the very definition of stupid, and so far every one of them has hung around mosques and terror teachers and the like, they just are not brilliant 007 type people at all, remember, they blow themselves up on purpose, dahhhhh…
Well, that stands to reason. No chance that terrorists could gain control of four jetliners with nothing more dangerous than office supplies and navigate them to specific coordinates and very specific altitudes unaided.
Or build bombs out of common household materials.
Nope, bunch of incompetents, those terrorists.