So are we wrong to be suspicious of young men, who commit the vast majority of crimes and terrorist acts?
You can be suspicious of whomever you choose to be afraid. However, it is not rational to have governments express your suspicions by treating every male between the ages of 18 and 30 as criminals.
I am not even sure what you thought your question meant. Focusing on “young men,” of course, would simply encourage bad people to invest more energy in recruiting, training, or duping people such as Colleen LaRose, Jamie Pauin-Ramirez, or Anne-Marie Murphy.
11 out of 19 is still a high proportion.
The point is, though, that the proportion of all the world’s Muslims who are involved in any way with such acts is really small.
So special profiling for all Muslim passengers just because they’re Muslim does not increase to any statistically significant extent the chances of catching a terrorist.
Here’s a less emotionally loaded analogy: A hugely disproportionate percentage of Nobel laureates are Jewish. But only an incredibly tiny percentage of the world’s Jews are Nobel laureates.
So if you want to find a Nobel laureate, asking all the Jewish or “Jewish-looking” people you meet if they’ve won a Nobel Prize is an appallingly inefficient strategy. You’re much better off targeting characteristics that tend to be specific to Nobel laureates: e.g., having a doctorate in a Nobel field, being a member of a high-powered academic research department, etc.
Similarly, if you want to catch a terrorist, and you know that a disproportionately high percentage of terrorists are Muslim but only a tiny percentage of all Muslims are terrorists, then profiling all Muslims or people you think might be Muslims is not an efficient way of spotting terrorists. You should concentrate instead on looking for characteristics that are more specific to terrorists, such as membership in extremist organizations (radical mosques, white nationalist groups, etc.), following a typical schedule of preparatory actions, and so on.
The Middle East is a violent place, for various reasons. Did you know that more Muslims live outside the Middle East than in it? India and Pakistan alone have more Muslims than the entire Middle East and North Africa.
Oh, missed this one.
Sure, but not to the level of profile-based “special screening”, much less the universal individual interrogations practiced by the Israeli security agencies you mentioned.
Isn’t that what we were talking about? Namely, which passengers (if any) should be subjected to individual questioning over and above routine universal surveillance, and why?
[QUOTE=Kimstu;19235034You should concentrate instead on looking for characteristics that are more specific to terrorists, such as membership in extremist organizations (radical mosques, white nationalist groups, etc.), [following a typical schedule of preparatory actions]
(Archived | A Look at Terrorist Behavior: How They Prepare, Where They Strike | National Institute of Justice), and so on.
[/QUOTE]
Which is often secret and not all are such members.
See, following your theories, we’d let thru most terrorists, just in order to not be “profiling”.
While following your theories, we’d also let through about the same amount of terrorists (since it’s unlikely that most terrorists adroit enough to evade detection by routine screening would be detected by individual scrutiny on the level of an airport interview), while additionally wasting boatloads of resources on useless heightened scrutiny of the overwhelming majority of Muslims who have nothing to do with terrorist activities at all.
El Al has not had a problem.
El Al, as we’ve clarified several times already, applies a heightened level of individual scrutiny to all its passengers, as opposed to profiling a subset of them for heightened scrutiny based on broad categories like race or religion.
And yes, that costs them a bunch of extra money spent on security staff and resources. If you want to propose how such methods could be universally implemented for a global air travel industry far larger than Israel’s without being prohibitively expensive and inefficient, I’m sure airline executives all over the world would be interested in hearing it.
Which is what I’d prefer.
and it’s cheaper than the TSA.
Absent that, instead of searching and interviewing everyone, I’d profile.
I am counting the attempted bombings as well. The two you referred to as unsolved were committed by Muslims groups, the Lebanese rebels and the Cypriot rebels.
I say Muslim because some of the recent bombers like the shoe bomber who was a British national and the underwear bomber who was a Nigerian.
Those aren’t “bombings”, though. Nor can we assume that all attempted bombings are equally reported worldwide. Successful bombings are indisputable, by contrast.
The wiki articles your list links to describe them as unsolved.
So what we have is one or two nationals each from a variety of countries (Nicaragua, China, Colombia, etc), then a big chunk from the Middle East. And you think you can get a meaningful profile out of that, and that it will somehow do more good than harm?
Yes, if 50-80% of airline bombers have a characteristic then it makes sense to profile on that characteristic. Especially if that characteristic is shared by a small slice of the public.
Makes alot more sense then trying to look for nervous people.
So tell me how this works, precisely.
Islam is the second-largest religion in the world, with 1.6 billion adherents. It is not a small slice of the public.
No, it makes more sense to focus on things tangibly related to terrorism. E.g., Sikh, Muslim, Chinese, and anti-Sandinista bombers might all appear nervous while putting their plan into action. Only Muslim ones are Muslim. And again, we’ve seen the poor results of profiling programs, like the NYPD’s. Have you ever glanced at the stats on that one?
The way it works is when guards or ticket agents see a passenger that meets certain criteria such as young, male, and muslim they get flagged for an extra pat down or a talking to, or their bags get x-rayed.
Islam is a very tiny portion of this country’s citizens, and a very small portion of the passengers on US airlines. What Air Saudi Arabia does is no concern of the TSA.
I am familiar with the fact that homicides in New York went down 82% after the NYPD adopted tactics such as profiling.
What do you mean, “their bags get x-rayed” as a part of special screening? Everybody’s bags get x-rayed by TSA procedures.
[QUOTE=puddleglum]
Islam is a very tiny portion of this country’s citizens, and a very small portion of the passengers on US airlines.
[/QUOTE]
See my above analogy about a Nobel Prize laureates being Jewish. Jews are a very tiny portion of this country’s citizens too, but that doesn’t mean that if you’re trying to find a Nobel laureate on a plane you should ask every Jewish passenger if they’ve won a Nobel Prize.
Which in fact is exactly what happens to Muslim travelers in the US. As this article documents, innocent “Muslim-looking” travelers keep getting selected for special screening over and over, while the screening system gets no closer to identifying actual terrorists.
In addition to the points raised by Kimstu…how do the guards and ticket agents tell who is Muslim? Are we issuing religious ID cards now, like Israel does?
If I’m not mistaken, no Muslim American has ever bombed a plane. So why are you acting like they have, and constitute some kind of danger?
The homicide rate went down everywhere. Are you familiar with the fact that, under stop and frisk, blacks and Hispanics stopped were less likely to have contraband than white people who were stopped?
No, but it may well have prevented 911. And surely that’s worth a few hurt feelings.
:rolleyes: No, what might well have prevented 9/11 would have been the administration paying attention to the warnings provided by intelligence agencies about specific patterns of suspicious behavior associated with specific individuals.
The idea that we ought to focus (or should have focused) our attention on clumsy, wasteful, statistically useless racial-profiling screening criteria even when we had in hand clear evidence for suspicion of particular identified individuals is the gleaming idiocy cherry on top of the stupidity sundae that the pro-profiling advocates have been laboriously constructing throughout this thread.