Originally posted by muntus:
Originally posted by sigma:
Moussaoui is a common Muslim name in Western Europe and Morocco, those of Moor descent.



Fixed.

It doesn't matter if it sounds Muslim or not. If it is a Muslim name, "common sense profiling" should be used.



So now you're "profiling" as extended from people are who Muslim, but realising that's impossible to determine, we've branched out to people with either Muslim-sounding names or people with Muslim last names whether they're actually Muslim or not. What about people with Muslim first names? Maybe Omar Smith?

And what about women? You want to target all Muslims, and all those with Muslim or Muslm-sounding names. But there's been no Muslim women arrested for terrorism. If you wanna really "profile", statistically-speaking a White Male is more likely to be a terrorist on a plane than a Woman with a Muslim last name. So, what then? Ignore the same statistics because we don't like what they say?

And then we still realize that we're going to miss at least 1 in 5 of them because, even now, 1 in 5 of these terrorists don't look Muslim and don't have Muslim or Muslim-sounding last names (or first names for that matter).

So all that needs to be done is either bring in 5 times as many people as you need so you can ensure that you still have as many as you need when the 1 in 5 make it through.

Or you do the much easier thing and bring in people that don't meet the profiling criteria.

I, personally, don't have a problem with profiling. But profiling in cases like these simply won't work. In terrorism the people actually doing the dirty work are just pawns. They're disposable, constantly changing, and can be anyone from anywhere -- it's just convenient right now for them to be largely Brown, Arabic descent, Muslim males because they're a dime a dozen. Profiling can work to catch the masterminds which aren't disposable and aren't dynamic, but it won't work to catch the guys doing the dirty work. The guys doing all the hard planning, the ones serious about what they intend to do, can go out tomorrow and find a bunch of teenage white girls to do what they want or whatever other group of people isn't going to have a high chance of being caught by a profile net. Sure, it'd be a little harder to find a white girl that'll do it versus the millions of muslim men that would

It's no different than changing your tactics when you can no longer get explosives on a plane -- you simply make a little change and disguise them in liquid drinks. It's called resourcefulness and adaptation. It's what terrorism is about. They're experts at it. They can change tactics just as easy, if not easier, than change initiates against them.

And what if we did profile? The tactics change more rapidly than we know to even look for them. Say we profiled and all these Muslim guys got to the Airport and were pulled aside. They were searched, asked some questions by some retarded TSA guy who had no real psychological training who may have noticed anything odd even if these guys weren't that good at hiding, nothing abnormal was found, and they boarded the plane. They then detonated their explosive sport drinks and killed a bunch of people. No one would have ever thought to run their sport drinks through any tests. They were just drinks. Profiling wouldn't have stopped anything from happening. Profiling doesn't stop people from doing something, it simply allows you an extra opportunity to catch them beforehand. But if you don't know what you're looking for it doesn't do a thing for you. We got lucky this time -- we knew what to look for before it was too late because of some tip-offs from Pakistan. It could have just as easily turned out much worse and we wouldn't have learned what to look for until too late, provided we ever did learn what they did to blow the planes up.

If not for the tips from Pakistan on who/what to look for, profiling or not, these guys would have boarded their planes, sport drinks in hand, and blew every one of them from the sky.

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