Agreed, which is why I’m not suggesting giving special scrutiny (on the level of the individual interrogations that “profiled” passengers get) to all people either. Nor is any security service capable of providing that combined breadth and depth of scrutiny.
[QUOTE=DrDeth]
Look, let us take your lower 1-10000 as a number, than compare it to the 1-100,000,000 of random Americans that pose any kind of security threat, then the numbers say- the chance a Muslim poses any kind of security threat is 10000 times greater than the population as a whole.
[/quote]
But the chance that a random member of the population poses a security threat is so small that even 10000 times that chance is still quite insignificant.
[QUOTE=DrDeth]
I’d say that a single young male, who appear devoutly Muslin- should be screened.
[/quote]
Nope, pointless waste of resources. The smart approach is not to look at a whole bunch of minuscule risks and devote a lot of expensive resources to scrutinizing whichever of those minuscule risks happens to be larger than the others. The smart approach is to find a way of identifying non-minuscule risks and scrutinize those risks carefully.
E.g., it is well known that people involved with terrorist organizations have a much higher likelihood of being security risks. Identifying people who are actually involved with terrorist organizations will thus be a useful security measure.
Trying to use age or gender or race or religion or fabric type* as a vague proxy for such genuine specific risks is inefficient and wasteful.
Which does happen sometimes. But no, of course no security effort is ever going to be 100% effective in screening out genuinely high-risk people.
That doesn’t mean that putting a lot of resources into screening people for superficial characteristics associated with negligible risk increases is a smart thing to do.
Face it, travel these days is subject to small but non-zero risks from terrorism. That’s going to continue to be true for the foreseeable future.
Profiling people who superficially resemble certain groups of terrorists, but who on average are not statistically significantly more likely to engage in terrorism than the general population, is just dumb and wasteful pandering to the public’s anxieties.
I’m saying that “people who appear nervous at airport security” and “people with anxiety disorders” are two different groups. Is there overlap? Sure. But a person’s behavior can be the basis of a reasonable suspicion; a person’s race, ethnicity, and religion can’t (except in the context of searching for a particular individual, based on a description).
I’m also taking it for granted that “appearing nervous” would be the sort of thing a competent air security force would be looking for, but have no expertise on the subject.
That’s it. Screen actual high-risk behavior as effectively and efficiently as possible (e.g, carrying bombs in luggage or pockets, being a member of a terrorist group, abandoning luggage in public places, etc.), and then just accept that you’re not going to have 100% success in averting disaster.
Spending billions of dollars scrutinizing particular groups of people on the basis of extremely weak proxy categories in the hopes of being able to reduce the disaster risk from 0.00000096% to 0.00000093% is not worth the time, money or effort it requires.
So, then- not screen at all then.:dubious: Obviously if we knew who was carrying bombs, we wouldn’t need to screen. if we already knew all the members terrorist groups, we woudlnt need to screen either.
That’s why you inspect luggage, to see who’s carrying (identifiable) bombs.
[QUOTE=DrDeth]
if we already knew all the members terrorist groups, we woudlnt need to screen either.
[/quote]
That’s why you check “no-fly” lists, to see who’s plausibly identified as having terrorist connections.
No, you’re not going to catch every genuinely high-risk person every time. But you won’t significantly improve your chances of catching them by diverting resources into screening for characteristics that are not in themselves high-risk.
[QUOTE=DrDeth]
BUT WE DONT KNOW THOSE THINGS!:rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]
That’s why you check for them. I don’t get why you’re apparently finding this concept so difficult.
Not on a single flight, certainly. However, airlines worldwide carry well over 3 billion passengers a year. If even 0.5% of those passengers are selected for additional screening that includes additional identity verification at check-in, physical examination and questioning by security staff, and the use of various testing and detection instruments, that could easily amount to more than $100 in costs for each additionally screened passenger, which is over a billion dollars annually right there.
Sure, but that’s only the terrorists we know about. Most terrorism is done by those we dont know about.
Here’s how El Al and Israel does it:
Yeffet: It’s mandatory that every passenger – I don’t care his religion or whatever he is – every passenger has to be interviewed by security people who are qualified and well-trained, and are being tested all year long. I trained my guys and educated them, that every flight, for them, is the first flight. That every passenger is the first passenger. The fact that you had [safe flights] yesterday and last month means nothing. We are looking for the one who is coming to blow up our aircraft. If you do not look at each passenger, something is wrong with your system…Yeffet: When you come to the check-in, normally you wait on line. While you wait on line, I want you to be with your luggage. You have to meet with me, the security guy. We tell you who we are. We ask for your passport, we ask for your ticket. We check your passport. We want to find which countries you visited. We start to ask questions, and based on your answers and the way you behave, we come to a conclusion about whether you are bona fide or not. That’s what should happen.
CNN: Every passenger should be interviewed, on all flights?
Yeffet: Yes, 100 percent…
I want to interview you. It won’t take too long if you’re bona fide. We never had a delay…
Which you will note I already remarked back in post #26:
[QUOTE=DrDeth]
Sure, but that’s only the terrorists we know about. Most terrorism is done by those we dont know about.
[/quote]
Nobody’s disputing that. The point is that you don’t come to “know about” actual terrorists with significantly greater effectiveness by profiling them for categories like race, religion, etc., that in themselves are not statistically significant indicators of likelihood of terrorist activity.
[QUOTE=DrDeth]
Here’s how El Al and Israel does it:
[/quote]
Did you really fail to notice that this source is explicitly AGREEING with my fundamental point here and disagreeing with yours?
Namely, these security services, by their own account, don’t selectively profile passengers for religion or race. They subject all passengers to the same intensive scrutiny.
So your endorsement of specific group profiling, as follows—
—would be rejected by the Israeli agencies you’re quoting.
As for the issue of giving all passengers the same intensive scrutiny, including interrogation and so forth: Sure, nobody disagrees that exhaustively screening everybody is a highly effective way to suss out the bad apples. The question is simply whether it’s going to be feasible in most circumstances to exhaustively screen everybody.
No, since everyone, including the single young male is interviewed and screened.
So, either we smart profile, or we smart screen everyone.
TSA is useless.
Either profile or do it like El Al does.
Your method of letting everyone thru that isn’t carrying a bomb in their luggage and isnt on the No Fly list is foolish and irresponsible. Your method isnt at all like El Al does it. There’d be planes falling from the sky like snowflakes in a Alaska winter with your idea.
Your method of letting everyone thru that isn’t carrying a bomb in their luggage and isnt on the No Fly list is foolish and irresponsible.
[/quote]
Remember, we’re talking not only about bombs but about all weapons here, and about screening not only luggage but also persons.
So why shouldn’t we let everyone travel who isn’t carrying any weapons and isn’t a known terrorist?
[QUOTE=DrDeth]
Your method isnt at all like El Al does it. There’d be planes falling from the sky like snowflakes in a Alaska winter with your idea.
[/QUOTE]
Why? What’s going to happen? Give me a scenario of how you think weaponless passengers with no identified terrorist connections would suddenly be destroying flights left and right.
And tell me how you believe current practices of racial/religious/ethnic profiling for additional screening are managing to prevent that from happening so far.
Sure, we all agree that rigorously interrogating and searching every passenger every time would be the most effective approach to security. But given that that’s not going to happen for most security services, why exactly do you think a second-best security approach needs racial/religious/ethnic profiling to make it work?
Should we then say that conservatives just want to make sure those brown people know their place?
That statement, (with which I do not agree), makes as much sense as your threadshitting.
Profiling on behavior makes sense.
Profiling on appearance makes no sense.
And that is a very nice description of applying quality metrics to decision making.
However, I suspect that we do not have enough, or at least the right type of, data to identify the useful metrics, and that is the source of much frustration and poor decision making. We just do not know.
Your point, I assume, would be that the resources should be spent on identifying the available data, collecting and collating it, and running statistical analyses to develop effective predictive models.
But then no one gets to slam suspiciously olive complected people around small cinder block rooms with tables and chairs bolted to the floor. What fun is that?
Medicine. Read up on Gift of Life; people of a specific ethnicity and religion were targeted - profiled - for tissue donor registration.
I don’t know that I accept those definitions. I’d say any decisions made based on the perceived race, religion, or ethnicity of a person constituted profiling.
(Those were the traits in the post to which I responded.)
(ETA: As you probably know, as it was your post …)
Did you really fail to notice that this source is explicitly AGREEING with my fundamental point here and disagreeing with yours?
