Not to impede the circulation of misinformation sent around our great american airwaves by Ann Coulter/Sean Scammity and the like, but when was the last time a little old white lady got roughed up, arressted, and interrogated by the FBI for hours for “sneaking a smoke” in a bathroom habit.
Sandy, far be it for me to defend TSA and the other aviation nazis (I’m still smarting from them confiscating my toothpaste during my last trip), but allow me to suggest that smoking a cigarette on board an airplane and then telling the interrogators that you were trying to light your shoe on fire is not the brightest idea in the world.
And yes, in the real world, grannies, politicians, and other travelers who do not fit terrorist profiles should not be getting hassled. We could do worse than copy the Israelis on this one (oh wait, no, we are doing worse than the Israelis on this).
It boils down to this — if the choice is between randomly hassling everyone and profiling / selectively hassling Muslims and foreigners, absolutely we should do the latter. It’s clearly the cheaper, utilitarian solution, and if you’re upset about being hassled, choose a religion whose extremists don’t try to blow up airplanes.
Ask the French how well profiling worked out in Algeria. (Here’s a clue for you, it didn’t).
Oh, and you do realize that they don’t “all wook awike”, right?
And you do realize that there have been Americans aiding an abetting them, right?
etc, etc.
The only way to create an effective deterrent is to make an attacker realize there is a reasonably high chance that any person will be discovered. If you provide them with a model for increasing your chances of getting through, they will exploit that and use it against you.
Alasdair
Jim Kelly – just cuz the French used profiling like they used the Maginot Line doesn’t mean that profiling doesn’t work …
If profiling is used as by the Israelis, then it works … if profiling is used as by the current White House, it makes the French in Algeria look like a major success story …
If you are dumb enough to publicise your model (ie the current White House), it is indeed true that the opponent will exploit that knowledge … which, again, doesn’t make profiling bad – it just confirms that dumb profiling isn’t effective …
What about Israeli profiling makes you think it works? And what about the French use of it makes you think it didn’t work? They actually used it in pretty much the same way.
It’s funny though, the former head of airport security at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel seems to disagree with you:
“Back in 1972, Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv was supposed to be attacked by a Palestinian, was never attacked by one. It was attacked by a Japanese terrorist killing 24 people. And it was attacked in the mid-’80s by a German terrorist answering to the name Miller.”
That interview is pretty good, I suggest you read it.
As far as your comment about publicizing your model, I think you misunderstand what I’m arguing here. I’m arguing that in general, equal scrutiny should be provided to absolutely everyone, with equal opportunity to be singled out for additional screening. That includes children, the elderly and women as both have been used in the past, knowingly or unknowingly, as bombers. Beyond that, just as the administration is doing, additional care should be used to screen people that match known intelligence threats.
If you want to call that profiling, so be it, but let’s not kid ourselves here. In general you are advocating for racial profiling, and I’m arguing against it.
And finally, back to the point about “publicizing your model” it really seems you simply don’t get security. Security through obscurity (in this case of your model) is not security at all. Letting people know that we are looking for known threats shouldn’t come as a surprise, and (this is the key here) there’s nothing they can do to get around this. They don’t, they can’t, know what we know. So they must *always* be concerned that we’ll single them out for additional screening based on intelligence we’ve gathered.
That is quite different from using racial profiling, where by necessity you end up spending less time looking at those you aren’t profiling. This creates an avenue of attack that will be exploited.
Jim, I finally got around to reading your link, and I had to laugh because you basically make my case for me. Rafi Ron in that interview says that the Israelis profile passengers at the airport before they board; it is not exclusively racial, it also takes into account where they are coming from and other information gleaned from forced interrogations. What I said that we should do is exactly that:
And yes, in the real world, grannies, politicians, and other travelers who do not fit terrorist profiles should not be getting hassled. We could do worse than copy the Israelis on this one.
!!!
Bottom line: For effective security, you can’t be blind to race, to ethnicity, and to religion; you have to factor all three traits in addition to other characteristics that may be more unique to that traveler and a specific time and place. We sort of do that in the U.S. already, but not really (what we have today is a sad combination of watch lists and random searches).
Alasdair
Jim – #6 – how many Israeli planes have been flown into building in Israel after being hijacked ? How many El Al planes have been hijacked ? Israeli profiling works precisely because it is not merely racial/ethnic and because they do not reveal what models they use for profiling …
French profiling is an interesting beast … during student riots in Paris during the 1960s, UK journalists noticed that when the CRS waded in with batons, the folk around the UK journos would get clubbed down, but the UK journos were untouched … when said journos asked how that happened, they were told that they (the UK journos) were easily identified (profiled) by how badly-dressed they were – so the CRS didn’t bother clubbing ’em in the middle of riots …
You show yourself to be part of the Projective Party (the Dems) by this – “In general you are advocating for racial profiling, and I’m arguing against it.” – you will be hard-pressed to find anything written by me in support of exclusively-racial profiling … mostly cuz, as far as I’m concerned, there is only 1 race on the planet and that is the human race … melanin content is a curiosity, not a handicap/disability as far as I am concerned … it’s how I have raised my kids – it’s how I treat people … so – in *your* perception the rpofiling that I advocate may be racial – but that is *not* the reality …
There are very few parts of Life where treating everyone exactly numerically equally has validity – and TSA screening ain’t one of ’em … I eschew quotas whenever I can cuz, for most things, they are horribly inefficient, as happens when any statistics are used badly …
AMLTrojan: I’m not really sure how you could take away from that article that it is in support of your view point. You argue that we should profile and selectively hassle muslims and foreigners, and yet Rafi Ron says, “We use profiling. It is not the racial profiling” and “one of the problems with racial profiling is that there’s a tendency to believe that this is the silver bullet to solve the problem. In other terms, if you’re a Middle Eastern or if you’re a Muslim, then you must be bad.”
How you read either of those central points, or his seeming support for Obama’s new directives for passenger screening and take that as supporting your point of view is beyond me.
You seem to still miss the point by asserting that what you said is what Ron is saying is equivalent to what you are saying.
What Ron argues for, what I’ve argued for above, and what the Obama administration has embraced is screening based on specific threat profiling. Meaning that they have specific information about a person that could perhaps include race, but more reliably will include specific information about their country of origin, sex, age, etc. It is based on intelligence.
It is not, however, based on the notion that we have the idea that Muslim men want to kill us so we’ll single out all Muslim men for screening. That isn’t based on any specific threat, it’s based on a general sense of what the next threat will look like.
More generally, to respond to both of you, I hoped that my above explanation would suffice in convincing you of the wisdom of my viewpoint, but apparently it has not.
I think Bruce Schneier argues it more eloquently than I do, I certainly couldn’t improve on it:
Jim – Schneier’s article is interesting, albeit a tad schizoid …
“There’s a dirty word for what Dean did that chilly afternoon in December, and it’s profiling. Everyone does it all the time. “ – so Dean used her powers of discrimination and acted upon what those abilities told her … Clever Dean !
So far so good …
“It’s just wrong to segregate people into “more likely to be attackers” and “less likely to be attackers” based on race or ethnicity. It’s wrong for the police to pull a car over just because its black occupants are driving in a rich white neighborhood. It’s discrimination.” – so police use powers of discrimination and the result is … Bad cops !
A discriminating observer might remark upon the insinuation that “it’s wrong for the police to pull a car over just because …” – since such an insinuation discriminates against honest and worthy police …
A discriminating user of the english language is fully entitled to be confused by the situational ethics displayed … we know that English is a highly contextual language, but requiring such a high level of discrimination to distinguish between the two situations is just plain ridiculous … and is that ‘good discrimination’ or ‘bad discrimination’ …
An interesting point – “Dean needed to have the training and the experience to profile accurately and properly, without stepping over the line and profiling illegally. “ … This should probably have been written better as “Dean had the training and/or the experience to profile accurately and properly. We need more people trained, like her, who can profile accurately and properly. More importantly, we need Dean and her like able and encouraged to do so without having to worry about being accused of stepping over the line and profiling illegally. “ …
Jim, you’re being incredibly obtuse. Neither Alasdair or I are saying to use racial profiling or to selectively harass Muslims! You’re reading a fiction into our words! What we’ve said is exactly what the Israeli guy said: We need to profile. Rafi Ron says, “WE USE PROFILING.”
Race, religion, national origin, and specific threat information can and should all be taken into account. But this is not what the government currently does. End. Of. Story.
Alasdair: I think you are kind of missing the point. Let me try one last time, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll just give up, k?
The use of a profile can occur in one of two ways. Let’s call them active profiling and passive profiling.
Active profiling is based on information you know. It is not necessarily correct, but it’s information you’ve been told. It *can* be based on race, heck, I suppose even religion (although you can’t seriously be advocating asking people their religion and expecting that to be an effective filter for screening. “Uh… Christian?” says the guy with the bomb strapped to his chest). Most effective, however, are things that are harder to fake or change. Nationality (not ethnicity!), origin of travel, age, sex, etc. Again, this is based on specific information you are given about a specific upcoming threat. Your use of this profile will not last forever. It is short term. This is *not* racial profiling, at least not as the term is used by anyone having a discussion about this topic.
Passive profiling, at least as we are using the term here (I just made these terms up, by the way, they needn’t mean anything outside of this conversation) is saying, “Hey, I expect my attackers to fit this profile, therefore for the foreseeable future I will screen people fitting this profile with a greater frequency. We may even use the same categories of criteria as in active profiling, however it is inconceivable that our passive profile could be as specific as our active one, because it can’t, it’s not tailored to a specific threat. These passive profiles are long term.
So, ignoring the fact that both Ron and the studies have said that these sort of passive profiles are ineffective, let’s examine for ourselves (again) the utility of them.
The active profile is responding to a specific threat. I can’t imagine you wouldn’t be for this, although perhaps you are arguing that we should also use what I’m deeming to be passive profiling. Are we all in agreement on that? I think we are.
Actually, you know what, you and I can stop there. You clearly seem to have trouble pulling apart these two concepts to understand the differences. I’ll get into why passive profiling is bad when I respond to AMLTrojan, but until you understand the difference, and that both Ron and the studies I linked to are making the distinction, there’s nothing else to say.
AMLTrojan: I don’t think I’m being obtuse at all. You aren’t saying to use raciall profiling or to selectively harass muslims?
if the choice is between randomly hassling everyone and profiling / selectively hassling Muslims and foreigners, absolutely we should do the latter. It’s clearly the cheaper, utilitarian solution, and if you’re upset about being hassled, choose a religion whose extremists don’t try to blow up airplanes.
That’s you, from #3, is it not? I mean, you actually said it. The harassing muslims part isn’t even an interpretation of your words, you said it.
Harassing muslims because they are muslims and foreigners because they are foreigners fits into the passive profiling that I spoke about in #14 (please read that if you haven’t, it was addressed towards Alasdair but I think it would be helpful to get terminology straight).
Broadening our profile to include the other items you spoke of (nationality, etc) does not help if they aren’t part of an active profile tied to a specific threat.
Passive profiling does not work because of two reasons.
1.) False positives in passive profiling make the likelihood of actually getting a hit near zero. You can’t possibly screen everyone fitting these profiles (or rather, you can’t possibly screen everyone who fits the profiles you’d like to use). Your likelihood for a hit is essentially identical to random screening. And yet truly random screening has the benefit of defeating the next item.
2.) If you create a profile, it will be avoided. Attackers are like electricity. They will chose the path of least resistance. This is my Algeria example, it’s the black widows, it’s the old woman suicide bomber. Attackers will purposefully try and circumvent your profile. It’s happened countless times. It will happen again.
3.) Inevitably, you will not be on the lookout for those that aren’t on your profile, that *are* trying to attack you. This is Richard Reid, this is the Japanese guy who hit the Israelis, etc.
So look, it comes down to this. Your way does not improve security. If anything, it makes us less safe because it diverts resources. My way (the Obama administrations way, it would seem) makes us at least marginally safer.
This isn’t a joke, this isn’t about being PC, it isn’t a political game. Peoples lives are at stake.
And by the way, I’ll note that I’ve laid out several coherent arguments, linked to convincing arguments by someone else, and linked to two studies that agree with my viewpoint. You two have simply kept repeating that it must be true! So please, either refute a specific point or let’s just move on.
Alasdair
Specific point … AMLTrojan talks about folk being “hassled” – for me, that means inconvenienced … *you* turn that into Muslims being “harassed” – for me, that means picked on unreasonably …
So – specifically, to which religion have those committing terrorist acts belonged, in the vast majority, over the past 5-10 years … specifically ???
Let us see – United Free Church of Scotland ? Nope …
Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform Judaism ? Nope …
Are you noticing a pattern yet ?
In the Dean example above, did she use active or passive profiling ? By your own definitions, she used passive profiling, and it worked …
So – I’m not quoting a study, I am quoting an example from Real Life … are *you* willing to accept that Real Life examples are real ?
Cuz the Dean example refute your passive profiling point …
Alasdair: Actually, you are correct, he did say “hassle” and not “harass”. It doesn’t change my opposition, but I shouldn’t paint him (or her?) has having said something that wasn’t said. My mistake. In my mind hassle still means being picked on unreasonably, but that’s different than harassed, which implies being continuously singled out for… hassle? That may be the effect of what AMLTrojan and you are advocating (I think it has to be) but it’s different than you explicitly advocating for it.
As far as your many religions listed, let’s look at it from the opposite direction. Which sects (because what you listed were sects, not religions) have committed terrorism. First, I don’t think you know the answer to that question, and I don’t trust that the intelligence community could come up with a comprehensive list if it tried. As they say, it’s more important to know what you don’t know than to know what you know. Secondly, how do you identify someone from one of these sects that you might have been lucky enough to identify correctly? You can’t. It’s simply an impossibility.
And as far as the Dean example, I don’t really think you are getting what I’m saying.
Dean’s criteria for stopping this person actually don’t fit very well into either model. It is not active profiling because it was generalized and not specific to a threat, and it is likely something she’d use in perpetuity, it’s not short term like active profiles should be. But it’s also doesn’t really fit into the model of passive profiling, either.
Look, Dean profiled based on a behavior that is fundamental to *all* human beings. Here’s a perfect example of the difference between that and standard passive profiling. I said passive profiling is long term. As opposed to active profiling, in which a profile might be used for six months or a year at most, a passive profile would likely last a decade or more. But would you ever create a guideline that recommends that the passive profile you would argue for should be used for the next thousand years? I doubt it. Would you create one that says that nervous and fidgety behavior should raise alarm bells, and that it should be used forever? I bet you would. Perhaps then we should have a third category. Call it an absolute profile. Things that are always true. It does not mean that every attacker will exhibit this behavior, but it’s always a useful profile, because it is human nature and because the number of false positives is relatively low.
So no, the Dean example does not refute the point. I’m not sure why you think it would, anyway, especially because it’s used in a piece that argues against passive profiling.
RT @CBSNews: Qatari Diplomat Sneaking Smoke Sparks Bomb Scare: http://bit.ly/cgeVeh
Not to impede the circulation of misinformation sent around our great american airwaves by Ann Coulter/Sean Scammity and the like, but when was the last time a little old white lady got roughed up, arressted, and interrogated by the FBI for hours for “sneaking a smoke” in a bathroom habit.
And yes it happens. I know little old ladies.
Sandy, far be it for me to defend TSA and the other aviation nazis (I’m still smarting from them confiscating my toothpaste during my last trip), but allow me to suggest that smoking a cigarette on board an airplane and then telling the interrogators that you were trying to light your shoe on fire is not the brightest idea in the world.
And yes, in the real world, grannies, politicians, and other travelers who do not fit terrorist profiles should not be getting hassled. We could do worse than copy the Israelis on this one (oh wait, no, we are doing worse than the Israelis on this).
It boils down to this — if the choice is between randomly hassling everyone and profiling / selectively hassling Muslims and foreigners, absolutely we should do the latter. It’s clearly the cheaper, utilitarian solution, and if you’re upset about being hassled, choose a religion whose extremists don’t try to blow up airplanes.
Huh? Profiling *absolutely* does not work.
Ask the French how well profiling worked out in Algeria. (Here’s a clue for you, it didn’t).
Oh, and you do realize that they don’t “all wook awike”, right?
And you do realize that there have been Americans aiding an abetting them, right?
etc, etc.
The only way to create an effective deterrent is to make an attacker realize there is a reasonably high chance that any person will be discovered. If you provide them with a model for increasing your chances of getting through, they will exploit that and use it against you.
Jim Kelly – just cuz the French used profiling like they used the Maginot Line doesn’t mean that profiling doesn’t work …
If profiling is used as by the Israelis, then it works … if profiling is used as by the current White House, it makes the French in Algeria look like a major success story …
If you are dumb enough to publicise your model (ie the current White House), it is indeed true that the opponent will exploit that knowledge … which, again, doesn’t make profiling bad – it just confirms that dumb profiling isn’t effective …
What about Israeli profiling makes you think it works? And what about the French use of it makes you think it didn’t work? They actually used it in pretty much the same way.
It’s funny though, the former head of airport security at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel seems to disagree with you:
“Back in 1972, Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv was supposed to be attacked by a Palestinian, was never attacked by one. It was attacked by a Japanese terrorist killing 24 people. And it was attacked in the mid-’80s by a German terrorist answering to the name Miller.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122556071
That interview is pretty good, I suggest you read it.
As far as your comment about publicizing your model, I think you misunderstand what I’m arguing here. I’m arguing that in general, equal scrutiny should be provided to absolutely everyone, with equal opportunity to be singled out for additional screening. That includes children, the elderly and women as both have been used in the past, knowingly or unknowingly, as bombers. Beyond that, just as the administration is doing, additional care should be used to screen people that match known intelligence threats.
If you want to call that profiling, so be it, but let’s not kid ourselves here. In general you are advocating for racial profiling, and I’m arguing against it.
And finally, back to the point about “publicizing your model” it really seems you simply don’t get security. Security through obscurity (in this case of your model) is not security at all. Letting people know that we are looking for known threats shouldn’t come as a surprise, and (this is the key here) there’s nothing they can do to get around this. They don’t, they can’t, know what we know. So they must *always* be concerned that we’ll single them out for additional screening based on intelligence we’ve gathered.
That is quite different from using racial profiling, where by necessity you end up spending less time looking at those you aren’t profiling. This creates an avenue of attack that will be exploited.
I rest my case.
Jim, I finally got around to reading your link, and I had to laugh because you basically make my case for me. Rafi Ron in that interview says that the Israelis profile passengers at the airport before they board; it is not exclusively racial, it also takes into account where they are coming from and other information gleaned from forced interrogations. What I said that we should do is exactly that:
!!!
Bottom line: For effective security, you can’t be blind to race, to ethnicity, and to religion; you have to factor all three traits in addition to other characteristics that may be more unique to that traveler and a specific time and place. We sort of do that in the U.S. already, but not really (what we have today is a sad combination of watch lists and random searches).
Jim – #6 – how many Israeli planes have been flown into building in Israel after being hijacked ? How many El Al planes have been hijacked ? Israeli profiling works precisely because it is not merely racial/ethnic and because they do not reveal what models they use for profiling …
French profiling is an interesting beast … during student riots in Paris during the 1960s, UK journalists noticed that when the CRS waded in with batons, the folk around the UK journos would get clubbed down, but the UK journos were untouched … when said journos asked how that happened, they were told that they (the UK journos) were easily identified (profiled) by how badly-dressed they were – so the CRS didn’t bother clubbing ’em in the middle of riots …
You show yourself to be part of the Projective Party (the Dems) by this – “In general you are advocating for racial profiling, and I’m arguing against it.” – you will be hard-pressed to find anything written by me in support of exclusively-racial profiling … mostly cuz, as far as I’m concerned, there is only 1 race on the planet and that is the human race … melanin content is a curiosity, not a handicap/disability as far as I am concerned … it’s how I have raised my kids – it’s how I treat people … so – in *your* perception the rpofiling that I advocate may be racial – but that is *not* the reality …
There are very few parts of Life where treating everyone exactly numerically equally has validity – and TSA screening ain’t one of ’em … I eschew quotas whenever I can cuz, for most things, they are horribly inefficient, as happens when any statistics are used badly …
AMLTrojan: I’m not really sure how you could take away from that article that it is in support of your view point. You argue that we should profile and selectively hassle muslims and foreigners, and yet Rafi Ron says, “We use profiling. It is not the racial profiling” and “one of the problems with racial profiling is that there’s a tendency to believe that this is the silver bullet to solve the problem. In other terms, if you’re a Middle Eastern or if you’re a Muslim, then you must be bad.”
How you read either of those central points, or his seeming support for Obama’s new directives for passenger screening and take that as supporting your point of view is beyond me.
You seem to still miss the point by asserting that what you said is what Ron is saying is equivalent to what you are saying.
What Ron argues for, what I’ve argued for above, and what the Obama administration has embraced is screening based on specific threat profiling. Meaning that they have specific information about a person that could perhaps include race, but more reliably will include specific information about their country of origin, sex, age, etc. It is based on intelligence.
It is not, however, based on the notion that we have the idea that Muslim men want to kill us so we’ll single out all Muslim men for screening. That isn’t based on any specific threat, it’s based on a general sense of what the next threat will look like.
More generally, to respond to both of you, I hoped that my above explanation would suffice in convincing you of the wisdom of my viewpoint, but apparently it has not.
I think Bruce Schneier argues it more eloquently than I do, I certainly couldn’t improve on it:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/profiling.html
If, however, arguments still cannot sway you, perhaps a study or two can:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/02/study-racial-profiling-no-more-effective-than-random-screen.ars
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2003/09/25/324/12748
Jim – Schneier’s article is interesting, albeit a tad schizoid …
“There’s a dirty word for what Dean did that chilly afternoon in December, and it’s profiling. Everyone does it all the time. “ – so Dean used her powers of discrimination and acted upon what those abilities told her … Clever Dean !
So far so good …
“It’s just wrong to segregate people into “more likely to be attackers” and “less likely to be attackers” based on race or ethnicity. It’s wrong for the police to pull a car over just because its black occupants are driving in a rich white neighborhood. It’s discrimination.” – so police use powers of discrimination and the result is … Bad cops !
A discriminating observer might remark upon the insinuation that “it’s wrong for the police to pull a car over just because …” – since such an insinuation discriminates against honest and worthy police …
A discriminating user of the english language is fully entitled to be confused by the situational ethics displayed … we know that English is a highly contextual language, but requiring such a high level of discrimination to distinguish between the two situations is just plain ridiculous … and is that ‘good discrimination’ or ‘bad discrimination’ …
An interesting point – “Dean needed to have the training and the experience to profile accurately and properly, without stepping over the line and profiling illegally. “ … This should probably have been written better as “Dean had the training and/or the experience to profile accurately and properly. We need more people trained, like her, who can profile accurately and properly. More importantly, we need Dean and her like able and encouraged to do so without having to worry about being accused of stepping over the line and profiling illegally. “ …
Jim, you’re being incredibly obtuse. Neither Alasdair or I are saying to use racial profiling or to selectively harass Muslims! You’re reading a fiction into our words! What we’ve said is exactly what the Israeli guy said: We need to profile. Rafi Ron says, “WE USE PROFILING.”
Race, religion, national origin, and specific threat information can and should all be taken into account. But this is not what the government currently does. End. Of. Story.
Alasdair: I think you are kind of missing the point. Let me try one last time, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll just give up, k?
The use of a profile can occur in one of two ways. Let’s call them active profiling and passive profiling.
Active profiling is based on information you know. It is not necessarily correct, but it’s information you’ve been told. It *can* be based on race, heck, I suppose even religion (although you can’t seriously be advocating asking people their religion and expecting that to be an effective filter for screening. “Uh… Christian?” says the guy with the bomb strapped to his chest). Most effective, however, are things that are harder to fake or change. Nationality (not ethnicity!), origin of travel, age, sex, etc. Again, this is based on specific information you are given about a specific upcoming threat. Your use of this profile will not last forever. It is short term. This is *not* racial profiling, at least not as the term is used by anyone having a discussion about this topic.
Passive profiling, at least as we are using the term here (I just made these terms up, by the way, they needn’t mean anything outside of this conversation) is saying, “Hey, I expect my attackers to fit this profile, therefore for the foreseeable future I will screen people fitting this profile with a greater frequency. We may even use the same categories of criteria as in active profiling, however it is inconceivable that our passive profile could be as specific as our active one, because it can’t, it’s not tailored to a specific threat. These passive profiles are long term.
So, ignoring the fact that both Ron and the studies have said that these sort of passive profiles are ineffective, let’s examine for ourselves (again) the utility of them.
The active profile is responding to a specific threat. I can’t imagine you wouldn’t be for this, although perhaps you are arguing that we should also use what I’m deeming to be passive profiling. Are we all in agreement on that? I think we are.
Actually, you know what, you and I can stop there. You clearly seem to have trouble pulling apart these two concepts to understand the differences. I’ll get into why passive profiling is bad when I respond to AMLTrojan, but until you understand the difference, and that both Ron and the studies I linked to are making the distinction, there’s nothing else to say.
AMLTrojan: I don’t think I’m being obtuse at all. You aren’t saying to use raciall profiling or to selectively harass muslims?
if the choice is between randomly hassling everyone and profiling / selectively hassling Muslims and foreigners, absolutely we should do the latter. It’s clearly the cheaper, utilitarian solution, and if you’re upset about being hassled, choose a religion whose extremists don’t try to blow up airplanes.
That’s you, from #3, is it not? I mean, you actually said it. The harassing muslims part isn’t even an interpretation of your words, you said it.
Harassing muslims because they are muslims and foreigners because they are foreigners fits into the passive profiling that I spoke about in #14 (please read that if you haven’t, it was addressed towards Alasdair but I think it would be helpful to get terminology straight).
Broadening our profile to include the other items you spoke of (nationality, etc) does not help if they aren’t part of an active profile tied to a specific threat.
Passive profiling does not work because of two reasons.
1.) False positives in passive profiling make the likelihood of actually getting a hit near zero. You can’t possibly screen everyone fitting these profiles (or rather, you can’t possibly screen everyone who fits the profiles you’d like to use). Your likelihood for a hit is essentially identical to random screening. And yet truly random screening has the benefit of defeating the next item.
2.) If you create a profile, it will be avoided. Attackers are like electricity. They will chose the path of least resistance. This is my Algeria example, it’s the black widows, it’s the old woman suicide bomber. Attackers will purposefully try and circumvent your profile. It’s happened countless times. It will happen again.
3.) Inevitably, you will not be on the lookout for those that aren’t on your profile, that *are* trying to attack you. This is Richard Reid, this is the Japanese guy who hit the Israelis, etc.
So look, it comes down to this. Your way does not improve security. If anything, it makes us less safe because it diverts resources. My way (the Obama administrations way, it would seem) makes us at least marginally safer.
This isn’t a joke, this isn’t about being PC, it isn’t a political game. Peoples lives are at stake.
And by the way, I’ll note that I’ve laid out several coherent arguments, linked to convincing arguments by someone else, and linked to two studies that agree with my viewpoint. You two have simply kept repeating that it must be true! So please, either refute a specific point or let’s just move on.
Specific point … AMLTrojan talks about folk being “hassled” – for me, that means inconvenienced … *you* turn that into Muslims being “harassed” – for me, that means picked on unreasonably …
So – specifically, to which religion have those committing terrorist acts belonged, in the vast majority, over the past 5-10 years … specifically ???
Let us see – United Free Church of Scotland ? Nope …
Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform Judaism ? Nope …
Are you noticing a pattern yet ?
In the Dean example above, did she use active or passive profiling ? By your own definitions, she used passive profiling, and it worked …
So – I’m not quoting a study, I am quoting an example from Real Life … are *you* willing to accept that Real Life examples are real ?
Cuz the Dean example refute your passive profiling point …
Is that sufficiently specific ?
Or even, dude, like, specific enough ?
Alasdair: Actually, you are correct, he did say “hassle” and not “harass”. It doesn’t change my opposition, but I shouldn’t paint him (or her?) has having said something that wasn’t said. My mistake. In my mind hassle still means being picked on unreasonably, but that’s different than harassed, which implies being continuously singled out for… hassle? That may be the effect of what AMLTrojan and you are advocating (I think it has to be) but it’s different than you explicitly advocating for it.
As far as your many religions listed, let’s look at it from the opposite direction. Which sects (because what you listed were sects, not religions) have committed terrorism. First, I don’t think you know the answer to that question, and I don’t trust that the intelligence community could come up with a comprehensive list if it tried. As they say, it’s more important to know what you don’t know than to know what you know. Secondly, how do you identify someone from one of these sects that you might have been lucky enough to identify correctly? You can’t. It’s simply an impossibility.
And as far as the Dean example, I don’t really think you are getting what I’m saying.
Dean’s criteria for stopping this person actually don’t fit very well into either model. It is not active profiling because it was generalized and not specific to a threat, and it is likely something she’d use in perpetuity, it’s not short term like active profiles should be. But it’s also doesn’t really fit into the model of passive profiling, either.
Look, Dean profiled based on a behavior that is fundamental to *all* human beings. Here’s a perfect example of the difference between that and standard passive profiling. I said passive profiling is long term. As opposed to active profiling, in which a profile might be used for six months or a year at most, a passive profile would likely last a decade or more. But would you ever create a guideline that recommends that the passive profile you would argue for should be used for the next thousand years? I doubt it. Would you create one that says that nervous and fidgety behavior should raise alarm bells, and that it should be used forever? I bet you would. Perhaps then we should have a third category. Call it an absolute profile. Things that are always true. It does not mean that every attacker will exhibit this behavior, but it’s always a useful profile, because it is human nature and because the number of false positives is relatively low.
So no, the Dean example does not refute the point. I’m not sure why you think it would, anyway, especially because it’s used in a piece that argues against passive profiling.