should we profile ?

[Calvinist]

Originally Posted by 1watertiger

during the past ten yrs. all terror attacks/attempts against the USA have been by male muslim islamic extremists. no whites attacking, no blacks attacking, no asians attacking. so why dont we profile people in our airports that fit the profile of the male islamic extremist?? agree? disagree?

While there have been a few exceptions to that rule....yes, the vast majority are by a very select group of people.

[rwilymz]

Originally Posted by lilypad

You will need to elaborate on the obscure comment.

What he and others mean when they reflexively dismiss the concept of using intel and profiling as the first tool in air flight security is that they assume that every nation has only X number of people who are trained and trainable in the necessary psych skills to pick individuals with nefarious intent out of a steady stream of the general public.

There are, say, 20 such people in any country. Israel found their 20, and they're all employed at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. Even if the US found their own 20, they wouldn't be enough to go around to staff each airport in the US ... so we shouldn't even bother trying. It's a dead-end plan.

There's just a few holes in their story:

1. there is not a fixed number of such individuals
2. there isn't even a limited finite number of such individuals

What is preventing us from implementing the Israeli method of efficient [and 100% effective] air flight security in the United States is, primarily, the fact that we started down the path of looking for things in the 60s as a basic marketting campaign to make American air passengers "feel safe" on the cheap. Buying magnetometers to find guns in the pockets of Che-wannabes wanting to go be all revolutionary in Cuba was significantly less expensive than hiring psychs trained in profiling.

And now, of course, we're on this gizmo-tech path, we invest more and more and more and more into it each time some nutjob spends $20 on a Junior Chemistry Set, even though the $500B we invest to stop that $20 gimmick is easily foiled by the next yahoo with a Junior Chemistry Set. And it would simply be too much of an admission of prior [and continuing] stupidity and short-sightedness on our part to concede that we were wrong in 1966.

So here we are, treating each of a billion annual airline passengers as potential terrorists, making them prove themselves innocent and eliminating their guaranteed rights until they do, rather than looking at the actual people trying to fly somewhere and giving a second, third and fourth look to, oh, maybe a dozen.