One ground truth on which all considerations of profiling is simple: It works. The experience of El Al airline over the past thirty years shows that conclusively. This ground truth is the single greatest reason in support of profiling.
The second ground truth regarding profiling is simply that it is offensive to all people who for whatsoever reason fall into the suspect category. The Geek is no stranger to this ground truth as there was a time in this country not that many years ago when all long haired men were viewed by security and police personnel as potential drug smugglers--despite the fact that no person would be so stupid as to use someone of an evident "hippy" appearance to run drugs on their behalf.
The Geek recalls with wry amusement all the times he was taken aside for "enhanced screening" even though he had valid ID up the ying-yang and was travelling on Official Business simply because he wore his hair in long braids in a form of tribute to his Apache ancestors. This sort of intrusive and often quite obnoxious secondary searching happened in a number of US airports as well as some in the UK, Germany, and even Luxembourg. To say the Geek was rankled is to engage in understatement.
Emotionally, therefore he is in sympathy with the views of those who are opposed to profiling as an insult to Muslims, Arabs, other people of color, and so forth. People would be insulted by the inevitable occurrence of profiling errors. The insult will be all the worse given that today's TSA employees are even more given to a species of arrogant rudeness far surpassing that exhibited by their predecessors of a decade and more ago.
Rationally, however, the Geek must go with the position that profiling is a valuable method of screening out potential threats even if it has a high false positive component. Considering both the problems of intelligence analysis pointing to a discrete, identifiable threat, and the exceptional vulnerability of an airliner in flight, the extra sieve of profiling is justified.
The first task is assuring to the greatest extent humanly possible that commercial airliners and other similar high value targets are secure from terrorist threats as the highest priority. A reliance upon advanced, expensive technology alone is insufficient. So is placing all hopes on the leak proof effectiveness of warning intelligence. Even a combination of the two is not sufficient guard to provide the appropriate level of safety for those travelling by air--or living and working on the ground below the flight path.
At the same time profiling is not an anodyne. It cannot and should not be used as the primary barrier in airline security. More, it is not a general purpose tool which can be used with equal effect to protect other high value targets such as sports arenas, concert venues, shopping malls, and office complexes. There are simply too many members of these target constellations with entirely too many of us bipeds coming and going for profiling to have any utility.
This set of considerations implies that the risks of alienating large segments of our own people or foreign populations is inherently limited. There is no real world based reason to conclude that the implementation of profiling will cause diplomatic difficulties with Muslim, Arab, or African nations. Neither, particularly if the matter is handled with any degree of sensitivity below that of purely barbarian, is their any realistic basis for the contention that racism, xenophobia, or any other manifestation of fear and hate will ripple through We the People.
The matrix of features which can be employed in a system of profiling is both well established and generally known. This implies that the utility of profiling is time limited as the Islamist jihadist groups will seek ways to fly below the profiler's radar in the same way the drug smuggling rings quickly learned what sort of person would be most likely to pass by the security and law enforcement surveillance without notice.
In the short term profiling would offer very real advantages in both the deterrence and interdiction of terrorist attempts to target flights to and from the US. Even a short term benefit would have longer term utility as it would provide the time necessary for the US and its allies to develop and implement more effective strategies and operational level doctrine for defeating the Islamist jihadist groups around the world.
There is just one major problem with profiling. It would require that the US government actually put a name to the enemy for the very first time. It would require the dropping of euphemisms like "violent extremist" and call it what it is: Islamist jihadist.
Telling it like it is might be too tough for the Nice Young Man From Chicago, and that means profiling will be dead on arrival forever.
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