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I agree with you 100% on security theater, but you have to be careful with "intelligent profiling." Remember that if it involves singling somebody out by race,
by ivraatiems 10y ago
I agree with you 100% on security theater, but you have to be careful with "intelligent profiling." Remember that if it involves singling somebody out by race, gender, religion, etc., it's almost certainly unconstitutional in the US.
- blisterpeanuts 10y agoby intelligent profiling, I mean more the way the Israelis do it: psychological profiling, looking for telltale signs of nervousness/guilt etc., ranking people by profession/origin/appearance, and randomly singling people out for more extensive scrutiny (but not so random as to nab the 80-year-old grandmother in a wheelchair).
- schoen 10y agoIsraeli airport profiling also uses religious and ethnic or national origin. When I've heard people endorse it as a good model for the U.S. in the past, I thought they were often saying they wished U.S. airport screening would use those things.
- athenot 10y agoBut that kind of profiling involves human judgement in a qualitative way, which is not very popular in the US. Instead, we prefer to use metrics, which we can mesure, aggregate and compile in neat reports. But metrics are a projection of a multidimensional situation onto a few dimensions, and hoping we picked the correct projection. I'm all for collecting stats but I wish that was just a tool used in addition to a broader qualitative approach.
- ivraatiems 10y ago> ranking people by profession/origin/appearance So a white computer programmer from Seattle might be "safer" than a brown janitor from Dearborn? And right there is your discrimination lawsuit. No government agency wants to expose themselves to that kind of challenge, even if they might win.