Originally posted by SVTatGT: Why not just search everybody? That is the only way we could come close to truly being safe...
We'll never be 100% "truly safe" because technology will never be able to pick up 100% of potential threats. So we need to do manual searches.
With that in mind, why is it worse for a person of Middle Eastern descent to be searched at an airport than it is for me? I've been singled out frequently based on my unusual itineraries and also the fact that I'm a relatively young single guy. But I'm white. One of my business colleagues is of ME descent, and he says it happened to him frequently for a year or so. Then apparently the airlines/TSA eventually marked him as a non-threat/frequent traveler, so he was searched less frequently. So we're basically talking about searches happening not exclusively, but merely more frequently to people of ME descent.
Public transportation is a different animal. People have never been expected to "arrive early" at public transportation centers like they have at airports. It'd be great if there was explosive-detection technology that would scan people without detaining them, but that's not the case. So we need to do manual scans. Setting up an infrastructure to do that on a large scale at every transportation center is impossible. So we do it randomly, target likely individuals, and hope for the best. Likely individuals, like it or not, are young single guys of ME descent. I'm sure those of us not of ME descent will get stopped too, but probably at a lower percentage.
Personally I won't take offense if I get stopped, and if I was of ME descent, I wouldn't take offense, and would instead think about ways to change the factors that have created suicide bombers. For example, if young white guys had an extensive history of suicide bombing, I'd personally be devoting a lot of my free time to organizations which speak out against violence of that type, which address the causes of such violence, or even which attempt to change the policies suicide bombers find unacceptable.
Sometimes fate places us in a position where we have to put in more effort than the other guy.
