is that the nutcases arent always the same race. Case in point: Jihad Jane. (not to mention Adam Gadahn, or Joe Stack, or Patrick Bedell, for that matter).
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is that the nutcases arent always the same race. Case in point: Jihad Jane. (not to mention Adam Gadahn, or Joe Stack, or Patrick Bedell, for that matter).
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Right on the money. That doesn’t even touch on the fact that in the Middle East (which, let’s face it, is where most of the craziest of the crazies comes from) there is a substantial population of non-Arabic-looking people, including even people with things like red hair, pale skin and freckles.
If you know your chosen enemy is targeting people of a certain ethnicity for scrutiny, you just start recruiting among people who don’t look like that.
I’m also often annoyed as heck with people who rant and rave that “80 year old grandmas” are not a threat. Leave alone the sexist canard there (they never say 80 year old grandpas), but it’s crap; talk to the Israelis, who have seen first hand how Palestinian terrorists quickly figure out things like “Oh, the Israelis don’t pay attention to women” and start recruiting women, or “Oh the Israelis don’t look closely at children” and so start using children.
Or talk to anyone at all involved in drug interdiction in the United States, who can tell you that drug dealers trying to smuggle stuff across the border love to use anyone who doesn’t “look suspicious.” They get major drug busts all the time on pretty young white women carrying swaddling infants, old retired couples traveling around in little mobile homes, smart-dressed businessmen, Christian religious pilgrims, every race, every sex, every age (infants and 90 year olds in wheelchairs!!).
If you’re worried about people smuggling bombs onto planes, the dumbest goddamned thing you can do is go out of your way to target swarthy Habib the shoe salesman while you let milk-skinned Francoise coming home from a trip to Lebanon walk past your blind stupid eyes.
Yeah, you give a little more attention to people traveling to or from certain countries. You also look out for people with certain known associations. But if you aren’t looking at absolutely everybody, then you’re begging to get caught with your pants down.
“If you’re worried about people smuggling bombs onto planes, the dumbest goddamned thing you can do is go out of your way to target swarthy Habib the shoe salesman while you let milk-skinned Francoise coming home from a trip to Lebanon walk past your blind stupid eyes.”
Oh yes, this is so much dumber than targeting Grandma Mabel in her support hose and walker while swarthy Habib is waved on through. Yep. Definitely. No doubt.
“Race?”
Oh yes, this is so much dumber than targeting Grandma Mabel in her support hose and walker while swarthy Habib is waved on through. Yep. Definitely. No doubt.
[Snicker] Miss the point much? Please let’s not put you in charge of airport security. You have limited security resources, Cosmic, so you’re going to put them all on Habib and just let Grandma Mabel walk right on by? Hey, I happen to work for Al Qaeda recruiting, thanks for the free tip.
By the way, talk to people who actually work in this sort of security. I have. If your enemy knows where you don’t look, your enemy goes there.
Hey, I happen to work for Al Qaeda recruiting, thanks for the free tip.
OT: you should put a screaming disclaimer after that comment so the prosecutors/wife’s lawyers don’t try to twist that into something it’s not (i.e. a serious comment)
Right, but then if you carefully and evenly scrutinize everybody, people complain that you’re being a stupid hamfisted invasive bureaucracy who’s just making life hard for everybody, rather than making a few basic and obvious simplifying assumptions.
You’re going to get accused of being either the Gestapo or the KGB: too focused, or too unfocused. There is apparently no right answer, if you’re in charge of a security response to terrorism and you care about a positive public perception.
It’s like the color-coded terror alert levels. People love to make fun of them, say we’re being kept under a constant propagandized fear of peril. But what if they’d not done that? They’d have been accused of being unserious do-nothings.
But at least it’s easy to criticize. We’re all pros at it by now, and most of us are just computer nerds. Imagine actually being in charge of the TSA or DHS. Who’d do that voluntarily?
Dean, perhaps you should talk to some airport security experts at El Al then, instead of the incompetents who run our airports.
With the rise in right-wing extremist violence at home
Huh? One crazy, quasi-rightie commits suicide-by-cop and that is (que Olbermann-voice) “rise in right-wing extremist violence”?
I know what you mean CC. My sister-in-law went with us to Hawaii.
She weighs up to 95 lbs when she’s heavy, is 74 years old, uses a wheel chair, has metal plates in her ankle and knee, can barely walk and the airport security radar hit the RED zone. she got the full body search and they confiscated hair spray and shampoo containers that were 2 ounces too big. After the radar wand –they let her go through after 30 minutes, in the certified bomb free airport wheel-chair.. Naturally, that was after they let her put her shoes back on.
Meanwhile, the PA is announcing security high alert for HNL. I was lucky, I brought in two bananas that were illegal but they managed to pass through the x-ray check.
More later…
I guess the guist of this post is that we’re supposed to forget that Yasser Arafat’s call for a million bomb vested martyrs was just hearsay.
LOL!
Strawman, strawman, strawman, wholly strawman, from both sides.
This is just people staking out positions and yelling past one another – it’s why Aziz is not happy.
Nobody does racial profiling. Age, sex, race, creed and ethnicity are parts of the profile, not the whole. The most important parts of the profile are behavioral. In addition you must check a certain number of random individuals, including 80 year old Medal-of-Honor recipient grandpas. Maybe we should do more profiling and less random checking here. The most persuasive commentary says that the TSA needs to ask everybody more questions while looking them in the eye. But these are empirical questions and I’m operating with no empirical data.
What worries me is the contention that we are profiling to avoid confrontation. That is, the TSA is unconsciously picking people who are less likely to object to the search. Again I have no data, just some frequent flyer’s well written hunch.
Yours,
Tom
people complain that you’re being a stupid hamfisted invasive bureaucracy who’s just making life hard for everybody,
two responses: 1. so what? i’ve borne the burden of increased scrutiny since 9-11 willingly because I see it as a duty – even when infuriating. It is everyone’s responsibility. and 2. Good. Because 99% of our putative security is absolute crap intended to only make us feel safe instead of actually making us more so. If everyone feels the burden more, then maybe we can build some geeral consensus to change things for the better.
CC, the El Al folks are pros. They have long ago sworn off racial profiling and almost exclusively use behavioral profiling as I have argued in my post. They also have the advantage, however, of having a tiny fraction of the passenger volume that American or European carriers do, they have all their security costs subsidized, and they have much more extensive govt records on Israelis and Arabs in Israel than we Americans would tolerate.
Tom, my post is basically a ocunterpoint to the argument by teh Malkins ofthe world. Right now I am quite pleased at how we DONT engage in more obtrusive profiling – though we already do too much, for example consider the case of the Scary T Shirt.
http://cityofbrass.blogspot.com/2007/07/jetblue-acts-red.html
Its a public battle and i prefer status quo, or pushback, to the otherwise inevitable.
two responses: 1. so what? i’ve borne the burden of increased scrutiny since 9-11 willingly because I see it as a duty – even when infuriating. It is everyone’s responsibility. and 2. Good. Because 99% of our putative security is absolute crap intended to only make us feel safe instead of actually making us more so. If everyone feels the burden more, then maybe we can build some geeral consensus to change things for the better.
Yeah, I’m not saying it should be different. Every time I see some hipster or full-of-itself TV show ridicule our post-9/11 security response for shaking down grannies, I want to yell at them. What would you do then, genius?
Far too many people just want to feel like they’re so much smarter than the idiots in power who are obviously just a peculiar mix of incompetence and evil, like the Post Office with tanks, to borrow a line from Emo Phillips.
Aziz,
> They have long ago sworn off racial profiling and almost exclusively use behavioral profiling as I have argued in my post.
Silly me. I should have read (or at least skimmed) your City of Brass post before commenting, so I could explictly agree with you in bits rather than implicitly disagreeing with you in my head. I was figuring the links for news articles without even looking. Aziz is not like most internet commenters…. Aziz is not like most internet commenters…. Aziz is not like most internet commenters….
BTW, the thing I just did is one reason I cannot listen to Mark Levin’s show. He’s a fine writer and has excellent political instincts, but then he takes a call. He often goes off on people when, if he were listening more and talking less, he would know they agree with him. And the yelling and the voice. When he’s calm and not taking calls, or especially when he is on someone else’s show and apparently feels constrained to defer to the host he’s much better.
Larry O’Donnell OTOH feels no contraints on other people’s shows. I can’t imagine how he would behave given the keys to a broadcast kingdom.
Yours,
Tom
> Far too many people just want to feel like they’re so much smarter than the idiots in power who are obviously just a peculiar mix of incompetence and evil, like the Post Office with tanks, to borrow a line from Emo Phillips.
It’s always humbling when the preacher talks about my particular sins. If I’m lucky he talks about doing the same stuff and we can commisserate afterwards.
Yours,
Tom
…and John Walker Lindh also showed this to us in like October 2001.
Is there someone out there that believes nutcases are all the same race? (I’m sure there is, but I just haven’t met him, or her, yet.)
Is there someone out there who believes that visuals (which race is certainly a part of) should always be completely discounted?
Seems to me that all available information should be considered. Is that racial profiling? I suppose it depends on individual sensitivities.
Brian,
Every time I see some hipster or full-of-itself TV show ridicule our post-9/11 security response for shaking down grannies, I want to yell at them. What would you do then, genius?
Right on! This irritates me to no end. Everyone has to go through screening, including grannies for exactly the reason Dean cites.
Aziz,
i’ve borne the burden of increased scrutiny since 9-11 willingly because I see it as a duty – even when infuriating. It is everyone’s responsibility.
You know what? I’ve been trying to think of why I am so irritated by people whining about airport security (when I happily go through it) and you have finally articulated for me. It is a duty and a responsibility. Thank you.
That is, the TSA is unconsciously picking people who are less likely to object to the search.
Possibly true. Are we cowed? Muslim Americans in particular have been listening to our community leaders tell us ad inifnitum not to make any trouble in line, not to object, not to argue, and to essentially be completely docile. Ive seethed against this quietly but cooperated as instructed without fail. Friends of mine have been detained for hours – one friend even had his laptop confiscated, and then his private photos on the laptop viewed, and he was questioned about some of the photos on the hard drive! (which were if harmless religiously-significant locales in India of special interest only to Ismailis of my stripe). Think about the depth of intrusion this represents. Yet we are instructed – and comply – not to agitate even in teh face of this.
Brian, if you can show me a consistent pattern of shaking down grannies at airports, then i think id have no complaints. Frankly, I do want grannies to be searched, and anyone else caught by a truly random sampling, not to mention supplemented by detailed behavioral pattern profiling. Its my kids on our planes, too, and I dont frakking trust anyone.
> Brian, if you can show me a consistent pattern of shaking down grannies at airports, then i think id have no complaints.
Actually, the hunch I read IIRC was that the TSA was unconciously picking certain frequent flyer business people repeatedly because they wouldn’t complain – presumably because it’s their livelyhood.
Yours,
Tom
What we should do, of course, is focus on risk factors, and ignore race
….
In theory
….
We will find, however, that, despite the occasional outlier like Jihad Jane and Johnny Walker Lind, the high-risk individuals will tend to share some rather (ahem) awkward characteristics.
A pure, objective focus on risk factors will still lead to a disproportionate emphasis on young men of Middle Eastern decent at this time. Not because we want it to. Not because we are racists, but because facts are often politically incorrect.
An airline employee famously had the heebeejeebies about one of the “9/11 19,” but stuffed his (her) concern, out of fear of being “politically incorrect.” He (she?) believed that it was WRONG
A pure, objective focus on risk factors will still lead to a disproportionate emphasis on young men of Middle Eastern decent at this time.
oh, youre quite wrong about that. You make the assertion on faith.
Profiling, racial or otherwise, is only designed to identify certain statistical patterns. They’re not intended to be anything more than a rough guide, and it’s silly to assume otherwise. Of course a lot of people won’t fit the overall trends.
If you’re looking for ties to terrorists, you look harder at Middle Eastern Muslims. If you’re looking for alcoholics, not so much. That doesn’t mean all terrorists are Middle Eastern Muslims or no Middle Eastern Muslims are alcoholics, those are just the trends.
LOL back atcha Dean. To argue (as you and Aziz are doing) that there is no correlation between Muslim men between the age of 18 and 35 and jihadism is flat out hilarious.
No, that is not to say that all jihadists are Muslim men between the ages of 18 and 35, but the huge majority are. Profiling is the process of identifying risk factors. To pretend that being a Muslim man aged 18 – 35 is not an increased risk factor for being a jihadist is nothing but an exercise in feel-good self-congratulations over your supposed superior enlightenedness.
Spare me. If I ran the airlines, I’d determine risks based on actual statistical analysis of the observable attributes of the individual. And that includes race, religion, sex and behavior.
And frankly, I wouldn’t give a damn if you didn’t like it. I’m about reality, not feel-good liberal fantasy psychobabble.
Dean, to turn your argument back on you, if you think that telegraphing our profile process is a risk because of the chance that jihadists will use that against us, then all your aproach is doing is making it more likely that a Muslim man aged 18-35 will NOT get searched, so if I’m Osama Bin Laden, my reaction is “Great! Now I can utilize the largest population of candidates knowing that they won’t get any higher level of scrutiny! SWEEET!”
Evil Rob got taken aside for special screening many times— hardly surprising, as he’s got the sort of build that would worry anyone. (Looks like a Viking. Really.) And, of course, there was the red flag trip when he flew to Denver when we were moving 1) alone, 2) one-way, 3) with a ticket he bought on the Internet.
The ironic part is that the smaller the airport, the better the screening. I’ve had my carry-on examined only at small airports (usually because I forgot that a metal bookmark looks remarkably like a knife, or I was transporting small ceramics.) But certain big airports missed Rob’s metal-toed shoes and just waved me through.
Of course, the small airport screeners also have time for conversation, and to threaten to confiscate your suspicious cookies. :D
To argue (as you and Aziz are doing) that there is no correlation between Muslim men between the age of 18 and 35 and jihadism is flat out hilarious.
yes hilarious, because we arent arguing “no correlation” at all. We are arguing for truly statistical random checks, supplemented by behavioral-based screening akin to how Israeli airlines do it.
You seem to want Jihad Janes, Adam Gadahns, and Joe Stacks of the world to sail right through security unimpeded. Which is what will happen if security obsessively focuses solely on swarthy young males. Because once you start talking about “risk factors” you have to allocate limited resources to maximizing return. Instead of looking at this as risk, you need to take a cue from the israelis, and look for empirical patterns.
To pretend that being a Muslim man aged 18 – 35 is not an increased risk factor for being a jihadist
DUH! A muslim man age 18-35 is *not* an increased risk factor for being a threat to the airline. But a jihadist? well, yes, but thats a tautology since a jihadist is muslim by definition.
And no, muslim males are NOT an increased risk of actually being a terrorist, either. You may want to believe this is so, but youre arguing on faith instead of data like Snippet did.
Easy excercise – tally every incident aboard a plan e where there was a genuine threat and see what nationalisties and ethnicites are majority. Burden of proo is on you since you are making the assertion, without data, and using it to justify a policy that (if you are wrong) would make us all less safe – including my kids on the next flight. If you wnat to put MY kids at risk, then you damn well better justify your argument.
“You seem to want Jihad Janes, Adam Gadahns, and Joe Stacks of the world to sail right through security unimpeded. Which is what will happen if security obsessively focuses solely on swarthy young males. Because once you start talking about “risk factors” you have to allocate limited resources to maximizing return. Instead of looking at this as risk, you need to take a cue from the israelis, and look for empirical patterns.”
If I am as guilty of creating straw men for your position as you are for creating straw men for mine, then I owe you an apology.
My approach is to evaluate ALL risk factors, and to tailor our targeting of individuals to search based on those risk factors. I was understanding yours and Dean’s argument to be that we should simply institute random sampling. My approach is to sample every category at some level, but to have higher sampling of higher risk categories.
For example, if our computer modeling of a traveler shows a white male, aged 25 flew from Encino California to Somalia, spent six weeks in Somalia, flew to Pakistan, spent four weeks in Pakistan and then bought a ticket to New York City, I’d expect that passenger to be rated a higher risk than a 70 year old Jewish lady flying from Iowa City to Hawaii and back.
What I want is a policy that aligns resources with risks. And to me that means doing exactly what you say, look at the nationality, religion, ethnicity, sex and age, as well as other risk factors, and producing mathematical models that describe risk based on those attributes, and then committing resources based on that analysis.
And whether you agree or not, or like it or not, Aziz, I am quite certain that once those risk factors are accurately analyzed and evaluated, a Muslim man aged 18-35, who is a citizen of several middle eastern nations would be a FAR higher (orders of magnitude higher) risk than an 80 year old grandmother from Des Moines on a trip to Bermuda.
I am quite certain that once those risk factors are accurately analyzed and evaluated, a Muslim man aged 18-35, who is a citizen of several middle eastern nations would be a FAR higher (orders of magnitude higher) risk than an 80 year old grandmother from Des Moines on a trip to Bermuda.
well, obviously. But the key to your (obviously custom-crafted) example is not the ethnicities but the rest of the data – origin, destination, age, etc. The race – which so many people obsess about – is a red (or brown) herring. As Jihad Jane conclusively proves.
And just because the hypothetical male in your (obviously, custom crafted) example is a higher risk than granny from des moines, doesnt mean that the muslim male is a high risk*. In fact, he isnt very high risk, because millions of such males fly every day without incident. What IS a high risk is ANY male on a one-way ticket to a middle eastern country, who paid in cash, who has been flagged before, etc.
Again, only behavior, not race or ethnicity, matters.
And which is entirely in agreement with what i said in my post – to institute random sampling PLUS behavioral analysis. But we must rule out racial stereotyping entirely because violent ideology does not know racial boundaries, and imposing ethno/racial consideration makes us less safe.
Just behavioral alone doesnt cut it and neither does random sampling. You need the random element as protection against adaptation. No matter what strategy They come up with, then They know that theres always a risk of detection, even if they do persuade granny from des moines to carry their package this time.
* if risk = 0.000001, then several orders of magnitude higher risk is still only 0.0001. ORD alone served 65 million passengers in 2009, ie 6.5 x 10^7. Global passenger traffic is about 4.5 billion passengers a year, ie 4.5 x 10^9. Suppose one violent terrorist attack every year, and every time its out of ORD. Then risk for an O’hare traveler is 1 in 65mil = 1.5e-8 = 0.000000015. Risk for a global passenger is 1 in 4.5bil = 2.2e-10 = 0.00000000022. I’ll leave comparative risk for car accident fatalities or cancer to you as an excercise…
Again, Aziz, you don’t seem to understand what profiling is for. It’s just a rough guide. If you’re going to look hard at 10% of the people who go through a checkpoint, profiling tells you which 10% is most likely to give you what you’re looking for.
The Israelis have been profiling for decades, because it works. Market research firms have too.
DUH! A muslim man age 18-35 is *not* an increased risk factor for being a threat to the airline.
Of course he is. Did you not hear about 9/11 or something? That single act skewed the averages for decades.
The denial here is just astounding.
If Amish people had carried out 9/11 we’d be looking at Amish. It’s not prejudice, it’s common sense.
I’ll leave comparative risk for car accident fatalities or cancer to you as an excercise…
This is an egregiously stupid comparison. First off, we spend hundreds of billions on car safety and cancer treatment, and secondly terrorism can kill thousands and do trillions in damage in just a few minutes rather than over a year.
Aziz, I’m afraid I have to conclude that you simply don’t get it. Why you don’t get it is something I can’t know. I can presume that you are in some sort of denial, but I don’t know that. All I really know is that I don’t want you or your type of “analysis” controlling who evaluates which individuals we should target for higher scrutiny in our airports.
CC, i dont get the problem we are having here. In my last comment i explained i am not in favor of pure random searches. You still seem to think racial profiling has merit and that my refusal is ecause I dont “get it”.
well, then El Al doesn’t get it either – because El Al doesnt do racial profiling.
http://securitysolutions.com/news/security_exposing_hostile_intent/
Aziz, as your own reference points out, El Al is consistently accused of racial profiling. That’s because they are scanning for “behaviors” that are consistent with certain ethnic or religious groups. Sure they technically aren’t “racially profiling” (wink wink) but it works out the same way.
And as I have said all along, my approach is not based on racial profiling either, it’s just one of many inputs into the model. If that one input has higher weight, that’s because it has higher impact.
Hysterical. Now, in Aziz’s world, you can invalidate an entire rule with a single exception.
Aziz, your lake of real world experience in, well, anything, makes you completely unqualified to comment on anything of substance.
Do you really think we should just scrap the idea of “profiling” that might catch, modestly 80% of the jihadis because ONE might slip through ? Or do you have some magic process by which you could stop more terrorists without a tenfold increase in resources or effort ?
And for the record, the only “flaws” in any profiling or screening process are the ones you advertise.
I know you WISH that were the case, Aziz, but wishing it were so is completely ineffective. Are there, as I pointed out, exceptions to the rule ? Yes. But that does not mean the fact that most terrorists are muslims has magically changed because of one American woman.
And saying it makes us “less safe” is laughable. There is some point at which you stop all terrorist attacks. Perfection. It is not attainable, so you measure yourself by the gap to perfection. Without telling the world – we only screen muslims / arabs – profiling is BY FAR the least costly, most effective method. It is not perfection, but removing that method moves us FURTHER from perfection, not closer.
Since when is identifying someone as Muslim racial profiling? This strikes me as a change of subject.
Muslims come from all races and all areas of the world.
So if it’s Muslims you want to profile, you’ve got a deeper problem: how about as a terrorist, I just claim to be a Christian? Or just irreligious? Now what?
You’re a terrorist and you know they’re looking for Muslims. Great. Just say “I’m not one.” Problem solved, right?
It strikes me that some of you guys are asking for easy answers instead of effective ones.
People are shouting past each other here because no one is talking explicitly about their core issues.
Aziz and Dean and others are rightly concerned about bigotry against Muslims and the institutionalization of the same.
CC and I and others are rightly concerned about political correctness and the institutionalization of the same. Political correctness has always ended up devolving into simple bigotry (typically against conservatives, rural people and whites, and typically expressed by stereotyping them as ignorant and, ironically, bigotted).
Forbidden words and forbidden ideas are always scapegoated by stereotyping people as ignortant.
Yours,
Tom
My easy answer is that I don’t ever fly and neither does my wife. So we don’t spend too much time worrying about what happens to those of you who insist on flying. Odds are that one of so many flights will reach its final destination, and do so head first, along with all the passengers and crew. Sometimes it’s from moslem jihadists. Sometimes from some non-moslem wannabe. Sometimes it from crummy aircraft maintenance or just plain bad airplane design. But it doesn’t really matter a hell of a lot if you are spending the last minute of your life strapped in the seat of an aluminum can, or whatever is left of it if it exploded in mid-air, and if you aware that it is the last minute of your life.
Mass death from air crashes is just something that happens. Sort of like the line that Kirk Douglas ad-libbed in at least two of his feature films:
“It’s not your fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not anybody’s fault in particular. It’s just the way things happen.”
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
> My easy answer is that I don’t ever fly and neither does my wife. So we don’t spend too much time worrying about what happens to those of you who insist on flying.
In this case, Jihad Jane was not trying to crash a plane, so although everyone began talking about TSA profiling, this would really be FBI profiling from posts on the internet.
You do post on the internet, right, Arnold?
Yours,
Tom
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