5 ms·

BS. Rebuttal follows. The screeners have no problem distinguishing Israeli Arabs and Sephardic Jews. 30 seconds of conversation -- if not simpler cues such as

by idan 16y ago

BS. Rebuttal follows. The screeners have no problem distinguishing Israeli Arabs and Sephardic Jews. 30 seconds of conversation -- if not simpler cues such as clothing -- will resolve any ambiguity. Israeli Arabs might not always be hassled, but they are certainly lined up for "increased scrutiny" more often. A lot more often. I have enough friends who can attest to this experience. I cannot count the number of times I've flown via TLV -- let's say that I've departed a few hundred times over the course of my life. How many times have I been taken aside for any kind of additional screening? Zero. Never. Ever. Every time I have flown, I've received the abbreviated white-jew-boy questioning about my bags and whether they've been out of my sight. That's it. Nothing about me, ever. Obviously, they deem me to be inherently safe, else it would be wise to randomly subject me to extra screening once in a while. Without getting into the advisability or ethics of racial profiling, we do it unabashedly in Israel, and that's a fact. Unlike the US, the threat profile is relatively narrow: Arabs and/or Muslims, and the one-time Japanese freelancers. Ergo, it makes practical sense to invest the majority of your screening resources in one place. As harmless-looking, pasty-white, computer-geek Israeli Jews, we feel the touch of the security apparatus more lightly than everybody else. Don't let that fool you into thinking that everybody has it as good as we do.

SandB0x 16y ago
Idan, I don't think you're really contradicting what I've written (especially with the Sephardic thing). I didn't deny that racial profiling took place at all, nor did I debate its merits or ethical status, I was asserting that it's not in any way the only factor. About your friends, it could be partly self-fulfilling. If they think they're going to be given extra treatment they might understandably act in a more nervous fasion, and as a result get flagged. However I'm just speculating here. As a fellow pasty white computer geek I've had my bags looked at on a number of occasions and some equipment swabbed, same goes for relatives who live in Israel. A British-Asian friend of mine went on holiday to Israel this year and didn't get any hassle at the airport. This is all the data I have to go on. I'm not doubting your account at all, but neither is mine "BS". (Anyway, didn't mean for that to sound so aggressive. Drop me an email and we can get a beer next time I visit and talk airports and code.)
- ig1 16y ago
  As a brit I'd be more worried about them stealing my passport then giving me hassle directly :-) (For those not aware: Israel got caught cloning passports of Brits travelling through their airports for identity theft purposes, despite the fact they had made an earlier promise not to do this again)
  - dc2k08 16y ago
    It beggars belief that the EU is allowing the transfer of it's citizens sensitive personal data there. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/1112/1224283152213.html http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/1112/12242831...
    - bh42 16y ago
      Am I am saddened that I am no longer surprised that this is happening.
- idan 16y ago
  Don't get me wrong. I have no personal beef with you :) Specific statements which I am refuting: "but the profiling is mostly behavioural" - behavioral profiling is secondary to the racial stuff. At the end of the day, a screener here is more likely to forgive some quirky behavior on my part because I am white and Jewish. Obviously, I have no hard science with which to back up this claim. My anecdotal sampling of friends indicates that their skin color and racial origin played a pretty immediate part in their scrutiny, since they tend to be geeky and harmless just like me. "It's also more or less impossible to distinguish (visually) Israeli Arabs and Sephardim/Mizrahim." - As I said in the post, this isn't true. Even if it were true strictly on a visual basis, there are other cues to go by beyond skin color. And regardless, the screeners know the difference as soon as a conversation begins -- so what's the point of this statement? "You're not going to get hassle for having darker skin." - again, no way to directly prove/disprove, but my anecdotal friend-experience says otherwise. You are correct about the self-fulfilling aspect; if I was an Israeli Arab flying out of TLV, I'd probably be worried that they're gonna gestapo me in a closed room. Particularly so if I know that I'm not any kind of terrorist, and have no fondness for interrogations.
MichaelApproved 16y ago
I think you're missing something. The fact that you fly so frequently probably means you require less security. They've dealt with you so many times already and probably know a lot about you. Before you even get to the airport all these things are evaluated. Your digital profile plays a big role, it's not jst about what you look like.
jwr 16y ago
Isn't that how it is supposed to be, though? I mean, apply some bayesian reasoning about the probability of someone being a terrorist _given that_ he looks like an Arab and/or is Muslim — and you won't be surprised some people are screened more thoroughly. Had the world evolved differently, they might be paying increased attention to white males with freckles and red hair. The US for some reason likes to pretend that everyone is a terrorist with equal probability and avoids "racial profiling". This is kind of like sticking fingers in your ears and shouting loudly "can't hear you!".
- srean 16y ago
  Statistical reasoning and Bayesian in particular, is frequently misunderstood in spite of its simplicity. It is also preferred that Bayes be spelled in caps. Just for arguments sake, let us assume that an Arab lookalike is more likely to blow up a plane. (digression: I also amuse myself by trying to look like one before flying, at least to the TSO.) The short answer to the source of the misunderstanding is that one usually forgets to take into account that there are far less Arab lookalikes than non Arab lookalikes. A common mistake is to go with the conditional probability rather than the posterior. The probability that an Arab is a terrorist, strictly speaking, the empirical conditional probability is the number of Arab with an intent to blow up the plane divided by the total number of Arab in the population under consideration. For arguments sake let me agree with you that this is higher than the corresponding conditional probability for a non-Arab. Lets represent these quantities by pa and pb respectively. The likelihood ratio that an Arab lookalike will blow up a plane is then (pa * Pa) / (pb * Pb) where Pa and Pb are the probabilities that a random sample from the population is an Arab vs non-Arab. What are known as the priors. Here we have Pb >> Pa. In order to justify that Arabs be selectively screened it is necessary that pa > ( pb * Pb )/(Pa). This becomes equivalent to the condition pa > pb when Pb = Pa. So I suspect that if anyone is sticking fingers in your ears and shouting loudly "can't hear you!". isnt quite, as you put it, "The US". There are other issues: It is hard to argue that pa is indeed greater than pb, i.e. for random samples of equal size there would be more terrorists in the Arab sample than not. Its quite a radical statement and justifications should have been mandatory. Also I disagree with your assertion that "Had the world evolved differently,..." things would have been different. My counterexample is that the Irish or the Catholics in US were not subjected to any of this on flights to Britain when the IRA were bombing away innocent civilians there. BTW this is not the only counterexample.(I also suspect that O'reilly's over the top assertion that terrorist = Muslim is a compensatory mechanism, conscious or unconscious I do not know.) The logical explanation for the way the security response is playing out in the field of travel seems to be that people are afraid of unfamiliar people and all it takes to tone down that fear is just some superficial familiarity (such as skin tone). So I am hopeful that this stage too will pass. Sooner the better, and I hope with no permanent scars.

by idan 16y ago

SandB0x 16y ago

Idan, I don't think you're really contradicting what I've written (especially with the Sephardic thing). I didn't deny that racial profiling took place at all, nor did I debate its merits or ethical status, I was asserting that it's not in any way the only factor. About your friends, it could be partly self-fulfilling. If they think they're going to be given extra treatment they might understandably act in a more nervous fasion, and as a result get flagged. However I'm just speculating here. As a fellow pasty white computer geek I've had my bags looked at on a number of occasions and some equipment swabbed, same goes for relatives who live in Israel. A British-Asian friend of mine went on holiday to Israel this year and didn't get any hassle at the airport. This is all the data I have to go on. I'm not doubting your account at all, but neither is mine "BS". (Anyway, didn't mean for that to sound so aggressive. Drop me an email and we can get a beer next time I visit and talk airports and code.)

ig1 16y ago
As a brit I'd be more worried about them stealing my passport then giving me hassle directly :-) (For those not aware: Israel got caught cloning passports of Brits travelling through their airports for identity theft purposes, despite the fact they had made an earlier promise not to do this again)
- dc2k08 16y ago
  It beggars belief that the EU is allowing the transfer of it's citizens sensitive personal data there. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/1112/1224283152213.html http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/1112/12242831...
  - bh42 16y ago
    Am I am saddened that I am no longer surprised that this is happening.
idan 16y ago
Don't get me wrong. I have no personal beef with you :) Specific statements which I am refuting: "but the profiling is mostly behavioural" - behavioral profiling is secondary to the racial stuff. At the end of the day, a screener here is more likely to forgive some quirky behavior on my part because I am white and Jewish. Obviously, I have no hard science with which to back up this claim. My anecdotal sampling of friends indicates that their skin color and racial origin played a pretty immediate part in their scrutiny, since they tend to be geeky and harmless just like me. "It's also more or less impossible to distinguish (visually) Israeli Arabs and Sephardim/Mizrahim." - As I said in the post, this isn't true. Even if it were true strictly on a visual basis, there are other cues to go by beyond skin color. And regardless, the screeners know the difference as soon as a conversation begins -- so what's the point of this statement? "You're not going to get hassle for having darker skin." - again, no way to directly prove/disprove, but my anecdotal friend-experience says otherwise. You are correct about the self-fulfilling aspect; if I was an Israeli Arab flying out of TLV, I'd probably be worried that they're gonna gestapo me in a closed room. Particularly so if I know that I'm not any kind of terrorist, and have no fondness for interrogations.

MichaelApproved 16y ago

I think you're missing something. The fact that you fly so frequently probably means you require less security. They've dealt with you so many times already and probably know a lot about you. Before you even get to the airport all these things are evaluated. Your digital profile plays a big role, it's not jst about what you look like.

jwr 16y ago

Isn't that how it is supposed to be, though? I mean, apply some bayesian reasoning about the probability of someone being a terrorist _given that_ he looks like an Arab and/or is Muslim — and you won't be surprised some people are screened more thoroughly. Had the world evolved differently, they might be paying increased attention to white males with freckles and red hair. The US for some reason likes to pretend that everyone is a terrorist with equal probability and avoids "racial profiling". This is kind of like sticking fingers in your ears and shouting loudly "can't hear you!".

srean 16y ago
Statistical reasoning and Bayesian in particular, is frequently misunderstood in spite of its simplicity. It is also preferred that Bayes be spelled in caps. Just for arguments sake, let us assume that an Arab lookalike is more likely to blow up a plane. (digression: I also amuse myself by trying to look like one before flying, at least to the TSO.) The short answer to the source of the misunderstanding is that one usually forgets to take into account that there are far less Arab lookalikes than non Arab lookalikes. A common mistake is to go with the conditional probability rather than the posterior. The probability that an Arab is a terrorist, strictly speaking, the empirical conditional probability is the number of Arab with an intent to blow up the plane divided by the total number of Arab in the population under consideration. For arguments sake let me agree with you that this is higher than the corresponding conditional probability for a non-Arab. Lets represent these quantities by pa and pb respectively. The likelihood ratio that an Arab lookalike will blow up a plane is then (pa * Pa) / (pb * Pb) where Pa and Pb are the probabilities that a random sample from the population is an Arab vs non-Arab. What are known as the priors. Here we have Pb >> Pa. In order to justify that Arabs be selectively screened it is necessary that pa > ( pb * Pb )/(Pa). This becomes equivalent to the condition pa > pb when Pb = Pa. So I suspect that if anyone is sticking fingers in your ears and shouting loudly "can't hear you!". isnt quite, as you put it, "The US". There are other issues: It is hard to argue that pa is indeed greater than pb, i.e. for random samples of equal size there would be more terrorists in the Arab sample than not. Its quite a radical statement and justifications should have been mandatory. Also I disagree with your assertion that "Had the world evolved differently,..." things would have been different. My counterexample is that the Irish or the Catholics in US were not subjected to any of this on flights to Britain when the IRA were bombing away innocent civilians there. BTW this is not the only counterexample.(I also suspect that O'reilly's over the top assertion that terrorist = Muslim is a compensatory mechanism, conscious or unconscious I do not know.) The logical explanation for the way the security response is playing out in the field of travel seems to be that people are afraid of unfamiliar people and all it takes to tone down that fear is just some superficial familiarity (such as skin tone). So I am hopeful that this stage too will pass. Sooner the better, and I hope with no permanent scars.