On profiling

[UPDATED: Great post on this topic by Tom Evslin here]

Following last week's arrest of the terrorists planning to explode airplanes mid-air by mixing explosive liquids, the Homeland Security Office released these new boarding regulations:

NO LIQUIDS OR GELS OF ANY KIND WILL BE PERMITTED IN CARRY ON BAGGAGE. SUCH ITEMS MUST BE IN CHECKED BAGGAGE. This includes all beverages, shampoo, sun tan lotion, creams, tooth paste, hair gel, and other items of similar consistency.

Ugh... I guess the US Homeland Security uses the old cliche about 'preventing the previous attack instead of the next one' as its founding principle.

You see, the problem is not the bad stuff, but rather the bad guys.

For example (and I know this may come as a big surprise to members of the law enforcement forces here in the US) the risk to planes is not inherently in this...:

...or in this:

...but rather in this:

I simply can't understand the 'no profiling allowed' policy. What it essentially means is that collectively we're willing to sacrifice the whole lives of hundreds of innocent people, just to prevent a couple of minutes of inconvenience or embarrassment to those unnecessarily profiled[1]. Huh?!?!

In Ben Gurion airport in Israel, security seems to be based primarily on profiling. Between the time you approach the airport and the time you board the plane, you are "casually" spoken to probably 5-6 times by security personnel (not necessarily in uniform). Asking a seemingly casual question and observing the person's response, stress levels, accents, behavior, etc, etc has 100000000x higher chances of catching a plotting terrorist than does asking millions of people to dispose of their toothpaste and take off their shoes.

Sure - once in a while, an innocent person with a combination of accent, skin tone, behavior, whatever will be mistakingly delayed for screening for 10 minutes. Sure, it's annoying when you're picked out of the crowd just for being an Arab, black, Jew, young, Muslim, single, Pakistani, whatever.

But that's all it is. It's annoying, it wastes 10 minutes, it might be embarrassing. That's it. Put that in contrast to a plane loaded with 400 people crashing into a building.

Any claims that profiling is racism or prejudice are ridiculous because profiling isn't about discriminating anyone eventually, but rather about making everyone more secure by focusing the effort on higher risk groups[2].

Furthermore, trying to prevent the previous terror attack makes life real easy for  terrorists because they have a simple play book they need to avoid. "Hmmm.., OK... so I can't hide my explosives in my shoes, and I should avoid liquid explosives... but it should be fine to hide some gun powder in a capsules looking like Advil, and try to explode the emergency exit mid-flight". Hey - even Richard Reid could figure that one out! (and I hear that intelligence was not exactly his sweet spot). It's a whole different story for a stressed-out, sweaty, 25-year old Pakistani male to disguise the fact that he's a stressed-out, sweaty, 25-year old Pakistani old male...

If you try to stop exclusively bad stuff (vs. trying to find the bad people), you are bound to spend shitloads of money trying to prevent yesterday's attacks while practically ignoring tomorrow's. 

So stop wasting time on wanding her for 20 minutes (even if, god forbid, she attempts to board the plane with shoes and toothpaste!!):

...and pick up your head to look for folks like him:

Worst case - if he turns out to be an innocent artist with high anxiety, a sweating problem and strange shoes, apologize for the 5 minutes of his time wasted and move on.

 

 

[1] Not to mention the humongous price we pay for hoards of people and machinery we buy to scan people who a 3rd grader would know beyond doubt are innocent.

[2] Here's a possible solution to this problem: Provide special "no-passenger-screened" planes on which you board all those folks who resist being screened for profiling reasons, together with all the hypocritical politicians who pass laws preventing profiling, and with basically anyone else who prefers to fly those planes. This will both guarantee that no one ever feels discriminated by profiling, AND will reduce terror attacks on planes flying reasonable human beings to practically zero.

Comments

[Jason]

Right, and I'm sure you spent a lot of time being "harmlessly profiled" for having brown skin. You didn't watch as police used their flashlights to help induce stress by causing pain. And of course those stupid terrorists won't change their tactics and focus on recruiting "European" descent bombers (you won't find any Muslims in eastern Europe). It seems that "we" are all going to be inconvenienced by terrorism...not just the people with brown skin, sorry.

[Yaron Galai]

1) Yes - you are right that I had my share of being profiled. Traveling with an Israeli passport is not exactly the best way to avoid getting profiled in, hmmm, most of the world...

2) The issue is not skin tone. It's the combination of age, behavior, martial status, stress and yes - origin. The params for profiling should be obviously adjusted by what track record shows to be the higher risk profiles. I didn't run the stats, but I will risk saying that in recent history it seems like more terror attacks were conducted by young, bearded muslim males, than were by old Swedish ladies. As such, I think a better use of your tax payer dollars (and a better protection for you) is to spend more effort chatting with these folks and screening them, than it would wanding a random group of old Swedish ladies. It is stupid to bug all the old Swedish ladies (using my tax dollars, and increasing my risk of exploding in a plane) just for feel good purposes.

3) Cops that abuse their screening duty should be thrown to jail.

[jason]

I've probably logged 700-900k air miles in the last five years. I've been to at 15 countries and in secondary inspection in Beijing and the US (I'm an American citizen). I mention this because I've spent a lot of time waiting and watching what happens in airports.

I don't believe for a minute that in the US we don't profile. I've watched a Muslim woman traveling alone with two small children and an infant, and I promise you...she couldn't have brought a paper clip on board that security didn't know about (SFO). Which, as a potential passenger with her, I thought was great. At one point my wife held her baby while she disassembled her stroller into its component parts. It was polite but thorough, and then the rest of us did the same thing. Had she been a Swedish grandmother would she have received that thorough a going over...probably not, but did she feel obviously singled out...not overtly so.

What I like about our current policy is that it doesn't assume the guilt or innocence of anyone. What this means is that people who are less likely to be terrorist are perhaps over surveilled and restricted - people who have a higher probability of being a terrorist are, I hope, sufficient inspected. I think your examples are also a little skewed (Swedish grandmother vs. Richard Reid) what we are really talking about is brown males between 20-40 (I count myself amongst them). I think it a poor policy to presume guilt of that large a group of people. And, let's not forget that the tip that helped police break the case came from a Muslim (good that he didn't think himself an enemy of the state).

Personally, I believe that we have to absolutely destroy Jihadist...there can be no compromise. I think you agree, unfortunately I think your approach is deeply flawed - nuance isn't weakness.

[Yaron Galai]

Jason - thanks for the thoughtful comments.

I am just speaking from my narrow and subjective experience. When I'm screened in an average US airport, I get the eerie feeling of being inspected by a cyborg that's trained to NOT converse with the passengers, and to NOT apply their intelligence to anything other than getting you to spread your arms and legs and wand you.

The Swedish lady might be an exaggerated example, but I have seen equally absurd scenes. For example, any frequent traveler knows that having a one-way ticket is a guaranteed way to get the dreaded SSSSSSSSS on your boarding ticket which mean you have to be screened. I was once boarding with a group of old folks (a couple were in a wheel chair and were being assisted) that were flying for several months to Florida. They all had to go through the screening, probably because they had a 1-way ticket. It was embarrassing having to see them go through screening when some of them were having a real difficulty standing up.

The example you bring with the Muslim woman seems like proof that profiling does not actually take place here. I think very few terrorist attacks, if any, were conducted by women carrying their own babies, regardless of their religion. Without seeing this woman and her behavior (and behavior is probably the single most important parameter in intelligent profiling... much more than origin, religion or skin tone), I'd say that she's actually a very similar case to the old Swedish lady and security would be better off spending their time (and our tax dollars) elsewhere.

I guess a good way to summarize my point is: Technology is not the solution for everything in the world. Especially when it's scarce and used randomly on people. Sometimes the best solution is using plain old human intelligence and common sense, even if the price is an occasional emabarassment.

[Yaron Galai]

One more point - we're all part of a community with one end goal: to stay safe and healthy at a reasonable cost. And the cost part is a zero-sum game. If you waste time screening one person, you're not screening the other.

Now, objectively, there are higher risk groups and lower risk groups. This shouldn't have to do with anyone's particular point of view or preference of skin tone. It's just objective empirical facts.

If a plane blows up, the chances of survival for both an innocent old Swedish lady and an innocent 25-year old male bearded muslim are basically identical. They'll both die, and it'll suck equally for both.
I just wish they would both relize this fact, and both equally support increased screening of higher risk profiles. Even if this means that the screening inconvenience is not equally spread.

At the end of the day it's not about protecting the old Swedes at the cost of humiliating young male muslims. It's about protecting *both* from higher risk folks, which just happen to be of the latter in our time and context.

I realize that I'm saying this from the "disadvantage" of not being in a particularly high risk profile in the US. But just like my fellow 25-year old bearded muslim, my origin, gender and age are pretty much parameters I'm stuck with whether I like it or not.