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Open question, here: Doesn't this backfire and make TSA more likely to operate on the basis of profiling alone? What makes a traveler suspect? This reminds me

Open question, here: Doesn't this backfire and make TSA more likely to operate on the basis of profiling alone? What makes a traveler suspect? This reminds me of Sowell's distinction between 'Type I' and 'Type II' discrimination: when all other information is forbidden from you, you'll end up using the only information you have as your heuristic, however noisy and biased that information might be compared to a more comprehensive source. This leads to incidental systemic discrimination. That said, if 'suspicionless' is tied to concrete external evidence rather than mere profiling, this should be a good move.

umvi 7y ago
Unpopular opinion: why is profiling bad in context of airplane security? If 100% of airplane terrorist attacks are carried out by people of X country (Xians), and 0% of airplane terrorist attacks are carried out by people from Y country (Yians), it seems like a pointless charade of political correctness to check Xians and Yians with equal frequency. I say profile the heck out of Xians. Stop and frisk 100% of Xians and 0% of Yians.
- StuffedParrot 7y ago
  It doesn’t work. The TSA is horrendously ineffective and is the definition of security theatre. This just hurts people needlessly. Much like the no fly list which is a huge violation of due process.
  - bitcurious 7y ago
    Israel is known for having effective airport security, as well as for making use of profiling.
    - kevinh 7y ago
      Do you have evidence that one is the cause of the other?
    - StuffedParrot 7y ago
      Hardly a role model for any state.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- SuperFerret 7y ago
  It's bad because it doesn't work. Your hypothetical is just that, hypothetical. Doesn't work in practice. Also, violated due process.
- cdmcmahon 7y ago
  I'll (possibly inaccurately) assume this is in good faith. The most obvious reason that profiling is bad, even in your inaccurate and simplistic hypothetical scenario, is that just because all airplane terrorist attacks came from people of X country, does not imply that everyone from X country commits terrorist airplane attacks. Therefore you are unfairly and immorally forcing invasive searches on many innocent people of X country. If you have any empathy for the innocent people of X country, you will realize how horrible this is.
  - umvi 7y ago
    > Therefore you are unfairly and immorally forcing invasive searches on many innocent people of X country. If you have any empathy for the innocent people of X country, you will realize how horrible this is. Okay, we are talking about an extra 5 minutes of scrutiny, not cruel and unusual punishment. I don't think it's really that "horrible" to make people from countries with bad track records jump through some extra hoops. To use a real example... it would be like me doing extra background checks on Chinese people applying to my company vs. Norwegian people. Not all Chinese people are spies, of course, but I've never heard of Norwegian moles infiltrating US companies and lifting IP back to the motherland being a rampant problem.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > Okay, we are talking about an extra 5 minutes of scrutiny, not cruel and unusual punishment. 5 minutes if you decide to go along and reveal your entire digital life to the TSA.
    - cdmcmahon 7y ago
      We'll have to agree to disagree about the invasiveness. In the case of the lawsuit in the original post, it's the search of all your electronic devices. I consider that to be quite invasive. Furthermore, CBP and ICE both claimed their authority to search electronic devices at the border extended to US citizens, so much of the profiling was not just of people from certain countries, but from people whose ancestry was from certain countries. Lastly, I can't and won't try to convince you that it's wrong to subject people of various backgrounds to different, worse treatment, whether it's "cruel and unusual" or unfair, or invasive, or even simply inconvenient. It sounds like you aren't usually subject to such treatment or else you would probably have a different outlook on it. I recommend talking or listening to some people who do, and what their experiences are like.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- garg 7y ago
  Your opinion is unpopular because it makes no sense and does not improve security. The attacker will simply recruit a "Yian" because that's your blind spot now.
  - refurb 7y ago
    I would actually argue it does improve security since you're spending more time on the people who have a higher probability of being a terrorist versus those that don't. What doesn't improve security is just random screening where you're frisking 4-year olds and senior citizens and letting the adult males walk on by.
    - hanniabu 7y ago
      It takes months to years for the regulation and security to start direct profiling a specific group. It takes this group a few days to change strategy. It's not very effective to have tunnel vision.
  - pattrn 7y ago
    In that case, the odds of a Yian being a terrorist would increase, thereby increasing the odds of a Yian getting searched. If we assume that the odds of being a terrorist varies based on demographics, then this would catch more terrorists than random searches. It reminds me of the N-armed bandit problem: use random searches some small percentage of the time, and use a distribution based on prior samples to identify subsequent searches. (It's not exactly the same, but the same technique applies.)
- tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  Xians can just start coming in from Y country.
- ninetax 7y ago
  Certainly an unpopular opinion, but perhaps the comment you're responding to means profiling in a different way? The way I typically understand profiling is that it's done to anyone who has features (skin tone, facial hair, clothes, etc) similar to Xians regardless of those people's actual origin. And since it's trivial to change your appearance from Xian to whatever-ian it seems pretty useless to profile in that way. Also, really annoying and alienating for those who happen to look like Xian.
  - magduf 7y ago
    >And since it's trivial to change your appearance from Xian to whatever-ian Sorry, I don't buy this at all. It is not "trivial" to change your appearance to look like a totally different ethnic group. You seem to have a pretty fantastical idea about the state of today's plastic surgery technology. You might try to hide by shaving and wearing different clothes, but you can't hide what your face looks like or what you skin tone is.
- knodi123 7y ago
  > why is profiling bad in context of airplane security? Why is airplane security different than other contexts? > 100% of airplane terrorist attacks are carried out by people of X country (Xians), and 0% of airplane terrorist attacks are carried out by people from Y country That's not the real world. There have been white terrorists, christian terrorists, etc. There have been muslim terrorists from most countries. Sometimes they don't look culturally muslim at a glance - maybe we should bring back Fumi-e? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumi-e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumi-e > I say profile the heck out of Xians. Stop and frisk 100% of Xians and 0% of Yians. As an islamic terrorist, you just gave me a fantastic idea about how to beat your security. I won't go into detail, don't want to make it too easy in case some other terror group also figures out how to look like a WASP.
  - umvi 7y ago
    > Why is airplane security different than other contexts? Because hundreds of lives are at stake, unlike (most) other contexts like screening college applications or work visa applications. > That's not the real world. There have been white terrorists, christian terrorists, etc. Are you saying terrorists happen at equal frequencies across all demographics? There have been Christian terrorists, yes, but those strike me as exceedingly rare compared to Muslim terrorists, for example. Why would you ever stop and frisk a family? Has a terrorist attack ever been carried out by a couple with children in the history of the world? Or even just gender profiling - how many terrorist attacks are carried out by women vs. men? Men should be scrutinized much more frequently than women; it's simple statistics.
    - bzbarsky 7y ago
      > Has a terrorist attack ever been carried out by a couple with children in the history of the world? Depends on how you define "children". E.g. see https://www.vanguardngr.com/2019/07/terror-attacks-the-inhumane-use-of-children-as-suicide-bombers/ https://www.vanguardngr.com/2019/07/terror-attacks-the-inhum... but we're talking 15-year-olds, not 5-year-olds here (and note: 75% girls). There is definitely an instance of a pregnant white woman trying to bring a bomb onto a plane (albeit unwittingly); see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindawi_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindawi_affair You are, of course, correct that the frequencies for the various things here are not uniform.
- DanTheManPR 7y ago
  Bruce Schneier had a series of blog posts on that subject, as part of a debate with Sam Harris. Pursuing a strategy that discounts the effects of false negatives leads to whole categories of failures in identifying risks. It's analogous to debates about medical screening - by narrowly focusing on detection, we discount the negative effects of over testing, which can lead to perverse outcomes where we hurt patients more than we help. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/the_trouble_wit.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/the_trouble_w...
- cortesoft 7y ago
  If it were the case (with 100% and 0%), then sure. But that is not the case.
  - cgriswald 7y ago
    No, not even if that were the case. If you only check people who meet the profile your attackers will start using people who don’t fit the profile. So those percentages wouldn’t stay 100% and 0% for long.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Because it disproportionally burdens all innocent Xians who did nothing wrong.
- baddox 7y ago
  It sounds like you don’t care about the damage done by searching innocent people. Of course, if you don’t care about that, then just search 100% of all people! Why profile at all?
  - miguelmota 7y ago
    Profiling everyone is inefficient
- wan23 7y ago
  So what you're proposing is that we should take the set of countries that have had an airplane terrorist and check 100% of people from those countries, and none of the others? So because once a British man tried to light his shoes on fire to blow up a plane we should specially check 100% of the 3.8 million British citizens traveling to the US per year, but we should check 0% of those traveling on North Korean passports? Your opinion might be unpopular because it's bad.
  - umvi 7y ago
    How about more like your country gets more strikes the more airplane terrorists you've had? So Britain has 1 strike, but Saudi Arabia has probably 20+ strikes. So you are 20x more likely to be searched if you are Saudi Arabian than British. And if you are from a country that has never had an airplane terrorist, like North Korea, why should you be screened? Maybe you should be profiled for other things, but not terrorism.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- dheera 7y ago
  For the same reason you try to avoid machine learning models from overfitting. If you train a cats vs. dogs machine learning model but all your cat pictures are indoors and all dog pictures are outdoors, the model may inadvertently learn to recognise indoors vs. outdoors instead of learning cat vs. dog features, and will fail miserably on an image of a cat outdoors. In your case, first of all, it's not 100%. Suppose 90% of attacks are by Xians and 10% are Yians. Profiling Xians over Yians might mean that you catch 90% of attacks. Maybe 95% if you search some Yians. On the other hand, learning to properly identify threats, independent of Xian vs. Yian, might allow you to catch 99.9% of attacks.
ddenisen 7y ago
This ruling has nothing to do with TSA. TSA does not control US borders.
- Fellshard 7y ago
  Fair. Insert relevant authorities instead; the principle is of more concern than the implementing authority in this situation.
  - sneak 7y ago
    "You are of <protected class> X" does not meet the legal requirement of "reasonable suspicion", so while this (potentially) increases harassment based on profiling, it cannot meaningfully increase negative legal outcomes thereby.

umvi 7y ago

Unpopular opinion: why is profiling bad in context of airplane security? If 100% of airplane terrorist attacks are carried out by people of X country (Xians), and 0% of airplane terrorist attacks are carried out by people from Y country (Yians), it seems like a pointless charade of political correctness to check Xians and Yians with equal frequency. I say profile the heck out of Xians. Stop and frisk 100% of Xians and 0% of Yians.

StuffedParrot 7y ago
It doesn’t work. The TSA is horrendously ineffective and is the definition of security theatre. This just hurts people needlessly. Much like the no fly list which is a huge violation of due process.
- bitcurious 7y ago
  Israel is known for having effective airport security, as well as for making use of profiling.
  - kevinh 7y ago
    Do you have evidence that one is the cause of the other?
  - StuffedParrot 7y ago
    Hardly a role model for any state.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
SuperFerret 7y ago
It's bad because it doesn't work. Your hypothetical is just that, hypothetical. Doesn't work in practice. Also, violated due process.
cdmcmahon 7y ago
I'll (possibly inaccurately) assume this is in good faith. The most obvious reason that profiling is bad, even in your inaccurate and simplistic hypothetical scenario, is that just because all airplane terrorist attacks came from people of X country, does not imply that everyone from X country commits terrorist airplane attacks. Therefore you are unfairly and immorally forcing invasive searches on many innocent people of X country. If you have any empathy for the innocent people of X country, you will realize how horrible this is.
- umvi 7y ago
  > Therefore you are unfairly and immorally forcing invasive searches on many innocent people of X country. If you have any empathy for the innocent people of X country, you will realize how horrible this is. Okay, we are talking about an extra 5 minutes of scrutiny, not cruel and unusual punishment. I don't think it's really that "horrible" to make people from countries with bad track records jump through some extra hoops. To use a real example... it would be like me doing extra background checks on Chinese people applying to my company vs. Norwegian people. Not all Chinese people are spies, of course, but I've never heard of Norwegian moles infiltrating US companies and lifting IP back to the motherland being a rampant problem.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > Okay, we are talking about an extra 5 minutes of scrutiny, not cruel and unusual punishment. 5 minutes if you decide to go along and reveal your entire digital life to the TSA.
  - cdmcmahon 7y ago
    We'll have to agree to disagree about the invasiveness. In the case of the lawsuit in the original post, it's the search of all your electronic devices. I consider that to be quite invasive. Furthermore, CBP and ICE both claimed their authority to search electronic devices at the border extended to US citizens, so much of the profiling was not just of people from certain countries, but from people whose ancestry was from certain countries. Lastly, I can't and won't try to convince you that it's wrong to subject people of various backgrounds to different, worse treatment, whether it's "cruel and unusual" or unfair, or invasive, or even simply inconvenient. It sounds like you aren't usually subject to such treatment or else you would probably have a different outlook on it. I recommend talking or listening to some people who do, and what their experiences are like.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
garg 7y ago
Your opinion is unpopular because it makes no sense and does not improve security. The attacker will simply recruit a "Yian" because that's your blind spot now.
- refurb 7y ago
  I would actually argue it does improve security since you're spending more time on the people who have a higher probability of being a terrorist versus those that don't. What doesn't improve security is just random screening where you're frisking 4-year olds and senior citizens and letting the adult males walk on by.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    It takes months to years for the regulation and security to start direct profiling a specific group. It takes this group a few days to change strategy. It's not very effective to have tunnel vision.
- pattrn 7y ago
  In that case, the odds of a Yian being a terrorist would increase, thereby increasing the odds of a Yian getting searched. If we assume that the odds of being a terrorist varies based on demographics, then this would catch more terrorists than random searches. It reminds me of the N-armed bandit problem: use random searches some small percentage of the time, and use a distribution based on prior samples to identify subsequent searches. (It's not exactly the same, but the same technique applies.)
tenebrisalietum 7y ago
Xians can just start coming in from Y country.
ninetax 7y ago
Certainly an unpopular opinion, but perhaps the comment you're responding to means profiling in a different way? The way I typically understand profiling is that it's done to anyone who has features (skin tone, facial hair, clothes, etc) similar to Xians regardless of those people's actual origin. And since it's trivial to change your appearance from Xian to whatever-ian it seems pretty useless to profile in that way. Also, really annoying and alienating for those who happen to look like Xian.
- magduf 7y ago
  >And since it's trivial to change your appearance from Xian to whatever-ian Sorry, I don't buy this at all. It is not "trivial" to change your appearance to look like a totally different ethnic group. You seem to have a pretty fantastical idea about the state of today's plastic surgery technology. You might try to hide by shaving and wearing different clothes, but you can't hide what your face looks like or what you skin tone is.
knodi123 7y ago
> why is profiling bad in context of airplane security? Why is airplane security different than other contexts? > 100% of airplane terrorist attacks are carried out by people of X country (Xians), and 0% of airplane terrorist attacks are carried out by people from Y country That's not the real world. There have been white terrorists, christian terrorists, etc. There have been muslim terrorists from most countries. Sometimes they don't look culturally muslim at a glance - maybe we should bring back Fumi-e? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumi-e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumi-e > I say profile the heck out of Xians. Stop and frisk 100% of Xians and 0% of Yians. As an islamic terrorist, you just gave me a fantastic idea about how to beat your security. I won't go into detail, don't want to make it too easy in case some other terror group also figures out how to look like a WASP.
- umvi 7y ago
  > Why is airplane security different than other contexts? Because hundreds of lives are at stake, unlike (most) other contexts like screening college applications or work visa applications. > That's not the real world. There have been white terrorists, christian terrorists, etc. Are you saying terrorists happen at equal frequencies across all demographics? There have been Christian terrorists, yes, but those strike me as exceedingly rare compared to Muslim terrorists, for example. Why would you ever stop and frisk a family? Has a terrorist attack ever been carried out by a couple with children in the history of the world? Or even just gender profiling - how many terrorist attacks are carried out by women vs. men? Men should be scrutinized much more frequently than women; it's simple statistics.
  - bzbarsky 7y ago
    > Has a terrorist attack ever been carried out by a couple with children in the history of the world? Depends on how you define "children". E.g. see https://www.vanguardngr.com/2019/07/terror-attacks-the-inhumane-use-of-children-as-suicide-bombers/ https://www.vanguardngr.com/2019/07/terror-attacks-the-inhum... but we're talking 15-year-olds, not 5-year-olds here (and note: 75% girls). There is definitely an instance of a pregnant white woman trying to bring a bomb onto a plane (albeit unwittingly); see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindawi_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindawi_affair You are, of course, correct that the frequencies for the various things here are not uniform.
DanTheManPR 7y ago
Bruce Schneier had a series of blog posts on that subject, as part of a debate with Sam Harris. Pursuing a strategy that discounts the effects of false negatives leads to whole categories of failures in identifying risks. It's analogous to debates about medical screening - by narrowly focusing on detection, we discount the negative effects of over testing, which can lead to perverse outcomes where we hurt patients more than we help. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/the_trouble_wit.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/the_trouble_w...
cortesoft 7y ago
If it were the case (with 100% and 0%), then sure. But that is not the case.
- cgriswald 7y ago
  No, not even if that were the case. If you only check people who meet the profile your attackers will start using people who don’t fit the profile. So those percentages wouldn’t stay 100% and 0% for long.
_bxg1 7y ago
Because it disproportionally burdens all innocent Xians who did nothing wrong.
baddox 7y ago
It sounds like you don’t care about the damage done by searching innocent people. Of course, if you don’t care about that, then just search 100% of all people! Why profile at all?
- miguelmota 7y ago
  Profiling everyone is inefficient
wan23 7y ago
So what you're proposing is that we should take the set of countries that have had an airplane terrorist and check 100% of people from those countries, and none of the others? So because once a British man tried to light his shoes on fire to blow up a plane we should specially check 100% of the 3.8 million British citizens traveling to the US per year, but we should check 0% of those traveling on North Korean passports? Your opinion might be unpopular because it's bad.
- umvi 7y ago
  How about more like your country gets more strikes the more airplane terrorists you've had? So Britain has 1 strike, but Saudi Arabia has probably 20+ strikes. So you are 20x more likely to be searched if you are Saudi Arabian than British. And if you are from a country that has never had an airplane terrorist, like North Korea, why should you be screened? Maybe you should be profiled for other things, but not terrorism.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
dheera 7y ago
For the same reason you try to avoid machine learning models from overfitting. If you train a cats vs. dogs machine learning model but all your cat pictures are indoors and all dog pictures are outdoors, the model may inadvertently learn to recognise indoors vs. outdoors instead of learning cat vs. dog features, and will fail miserably on an image of a cat outdoors. In your case, first of all, it's not 100%. Suppose 90% of attacks are by Xians and 10% are Yians. Profiling Xians over Yians might mean that you catch 90% of attacks. Maybe 95% if you search some Yians. On the other hand, learning to properly identify threats, independent of Xian vs. Yian, might allow you to catch 99.9% of attacks.

ddenisen 7y ago

This ruling has nothing to do with TSA. TSA does not control US borders.

Fellshard 7y ago
Fair. Insert relevant authorities instead; the principle is of more concern than the implementing authority in this situation.
- sneak 7y ago
  "You are of <protected class> X" does not meet the legal requirement of "reasonable suspicion", so while this (potentially) increases harassment based on profiling, it cannot meaningfully increase negative legal outcomes thereby.