Now now, TourDeForce. You're a bright guy and I respect your, but you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. And perhaps I'm not being clear, but I'm certainly being verbose.

Originally posted by TourDeForce:
Originally posted by sigma:
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.



El-Al profiles as part of their system - which you admit works, yet you insist that profiling can't be done to any degree that has been suggested in this thread, and further that the El-Al system cannot be implimented here.

I ask for a solution & you offer one that you freely confess we cannot use. Not much of a solution then is it...

C'mon, Sigma! Throw some meat into the discussion!




I never insisted that profiling can't be done to "the degree that has been suggested in this thread". I said that it wouldn't yield anything when done "in the way that has been suggested in this thread". It can be done, it just wouldn't do anything because the type of profiling suggested in this thread is NOT the same type of profiling that El-Al does.

Like I said, profiling works when you know what you're looking for. El-Al's profiling works because they are looking for terrorists. They know what they're looking for and their system is designed to look for it. Looking for Terrorists is not the same thing as looking for Muslims. If El-Al profiled every Muslim on their flights the plane would never leave the ground; yet despite not checking every Muslim or anywhere even close to every one, and despite being the most targetted airline in the world, they have no security problems.

The profiling suggested within this thread looks for Muslims. What does that get you? Nothing. At best it might help find terrorists within the Muslim population if it was executed properly with the proper infrastructure underneath to research people, interview them, and monitor them before and after the security check. That's a dangerous presumption to make, that your terrorists will never change in demographic (although we know that they are) and that your underlying investigative infrastructure is thorough (which is we know it is not).

It's very simple -- Do you want to find Muslims or do you want to find Terrorists? Because that's the fundamental difference between the type of profiling suggested in this thread and the type of profiling done by El-Al.

Quote:

I ask for a solution & you offer one that you freely confess we cannot use. Not much of a solution then is it...



I didn't say we couldn't use it. I said they took it further than we could get away with in the US. Big difference there. We can't have the CIA interrogating people at the Gate, for example, but we could train our TSA agents in psychological profiling and observation techniques rather than them just being Bin Monkeys. Hell I'd be happy if they could find a friggin' knife that I throw into the bucket since I've gotten knives through security more often than not which instills so much faith in the system.

There are certainly aspects we can easily do here in the US without worrying about the ACLU throwing a hissy fit. And some of it will require a slight culture change. Better law enforcement cooperation which is still very lacking years after 9/11 would ensure that the crosschecked records are current and thorough. Having trained security personnel to ask specific poignant questions (that aren't always the same) to gauge reaction should be a basic cornerstone of security, but we only do it in the US on International flights and those entering the borders via car. At least US Customs and Border Patrol tries some sort of observational profiling with their very limited resources, but for domestic flights the TSA might as well be deaf, dumb, and blind.

At this point I'd honestly be happy if we could just get our half-assed "security" system and methods down that we've got right now. But what we really need is a mentality shift akin to the one that El-Al had in the 70's. But, frankly, it's all a moot point because, as long as the TSA is running it, nothing is going to get done. They can't even get something as simple as operating an X-Ray machine down, with people getting guns, knives, stun guns, and Lord knows what else through all the time. We certainly can't expect them to do something that is significantly more complicated.

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