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Heres' the part I don't get. If we aren't profiling, how do we know it doesn't work? Some people sure think it wouldn't work, but how can we know it won't work unless we try it for a period of time?



Um, we are profiling. And how do we know it doesn't work? We were profiling before 9/11. Didn't work so well, did it?

The difference is that we didn't profile on something as open-ended and ultimately useless as whether or not a person is Brown. We profile based on criminal activity, suspicious movements, and other items that directly relate to crime. But even those capabilities are limited by a lack of law enforcement cooperation and some civil liberties laws that make some things like finances and unususal spending or purchasing habits unattainable. And ultimately limited by the fact that even "good guys" with no records can commit heinous crimes.

And what did the terrorists do? They adapted. . They went through pains to ensure that the people they hired stayed out of trouble. The started revruiting within a nation and limited movements that might arouse suspicion. They knew the profile and they altered their tactics to bypass it. It's how they got 9/11 done. It's how Richard Reid got a bomb on the plane inside his shoe. And it's how these British guys would have gotten their bombs on their planes.

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Think about it, it used to only take a pair of boxcutters to kill 2,000 people. Now it's not that easy.



"Not that easy"? Now it only takes a sport drink and an iPod. Sounds pretty damned easy to me. We got damned lucky that one wasn't carried out thanks to that tip from Pakistan.

Originally posted by TourDeForce:
Let's have it. I've been asking for this information from ANYBODY who would denounce profiling, and I've done it in a civil manner, I thought.



You should know. You brought up El-Al yourself, which I've frequently mentioned as doing it right, albeit a bit "further" than you can get away with in the US.

This will be verbose, the last paragraph has the short and sweet of it...

El-Al does profile, yes, albeit in a completely different way than people here of thinking when they think of profiling. I don't have an issue with profiling. I have an issue with thinking that profiling is actually going to catch anyone. That's not what profiling does. Profiling doesn't catch people, it simply says "there's something unusual with this one" and sets it aside for closer look. There's nothing unusual about a Muslim on a flight or a guy named Ahkmed. There is something unusual about a bunch of passengers of varying last names who all specifically request seats in an area of the plane well-hidden by a bulkhead. Profiling would set them aside for further questioning and more in-depth look to see if there's any commonalities amongst those passengers. It doesn't go, "Hey, you, Muslim, Step Aside." Not because that would offend Muslims, because you have a finite amount of time and resources and if your profile focuses on the Muslim guy it ignores those guys who really are illustrating potentially suspiscious behavior.

El-Al doesn't profile based primarily off the way a person looks. Whether they're Muslim or not. Or what they're last name is. Those are factors in the algorithm yes, but the meat of their system looks at criminal history, past travel arrangements, any unusual discrepancies in your financials. Passenges are subjected to interviews by trained personnel looking for anything remotely suspiscious. Most importantly every single passenger is subjected to the same profiling routine. White people or people with the last name of Smith don't get a free pass simply because they're White.

There is a very significant root difference between the way that El-Al does security and the way that the TSA does security. The difference is that the TSA is looking for something and El-Al is looking for someone.

Looking for a weapon, looking for a Muslim, looking for a Brown guy, it's all looking for something. Things change easily. You change the weapon to whatever they're not looking for at the time. You choose people that don't match the profile.

But people are much more difficult to change. Fundamentally there are certain characteristics between terrorists that are MUCH less likely to change than what color a person is. Trained psychological profilers, as opposed to the incredible bureaucratic inefficiency and display of retard-dom that is the TSA, can pick these behaviors out based on responses to questions or how a person acts/reacts.

Terrorists can be White, Black, or Brown. Might have Muslim last names or might not. Might be Muslim might not. Might even be female. The might have boxcutters, bombs, guns, or even laced sport drinks. But they're all farking nutjobs. You can change to recruiting teenage white girls, but you're still gonna have to find one that's a wacko, that shares the same inherent characteristics of the Muslim men you could have gotten, if you want her to do the same thing.

Does it work? Well, the most targetted airline in the world hasn't had a single terrorist attempt since they changed the way they thought of security.

Plain and Simple: Start looking for wackos and nutjobs, stop just looking for bombs that are obviously changing faster than you even know what to look for, and don't start looking for a "profile" that can also change faster than you even know what to look for.

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