TSA's Head of Security 'Removed' from Office

Re:TSA's Head of Security 'Removed' from Office by blisterpeanuts on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @11:10AM (#11762207)

by 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).

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Re:TSA's Head of Security 'Removed' from Office by schoen on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @11:35AM (#11762400)

Israeli 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.

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Re:TSA's Head of Security 'Removed' from Office by ivraatiems on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @12:00PM (#11762631)

> 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.

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Re:TSA's Head of Security 'Removed' from Office by athenot on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @11:43AM (#11762469)

But 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.

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