Sunk cost fallacy isn't even what's driving that sort of thing. It isn't even that they spent the money and want to keep justifying it. There are parties with a vested financial interested in the continued use of such things.

Yeah, those scanners where you hold your hands up were a big boondoggle.

Quite right. Israel's El Al simply profiles everyone that flies and by doing so they obviate the need to use stupid, expensive equipment that does nothing other than bottleneck airports and cause frustration. The Israelis are the best in the world at what they do regarding air security. The West has considered using the same techniques and they likely should. I'm not opposed to profiling if the person fits the profile. Better profiling than dead innocents. People do not have the right to not be offended. I get the heavy hand for some reason every time I fly and I'm literally the grey man, but I understand and go along with it. I'm also squeeky clean from a legal standpoint.

El Al security is not a good model at all.

I'm still yet to figure out what they achieved by seizing my backpack (that had all of my personal documentation) and damaging my brand new MBP 2016 and Pixel tablet (by very clearly dropping them a dozen times) had to do with security. Especially when they lied about putting it on the plane and I arrived at Ben Gurion with literally nothing other than a passport in one pocket and a dead phone in the other.

El Al's actions say the opposite about what you say about Israelis: El Al clearly believes that they are better at what they do than the IDF or Ben Gurion airport security, so they take it upon themselves (as private citizens) to pick up the slack. For what it's worth, the woman who interviewed me at Ben Gurion didn't have a lot of nice things to say about El Al either.

Why has El Al security seized your backpack? I can see why they'd want to search a backpack, but can't for the life of me understand why they'd seize it. I know airlines can sometimes check-in your carry-on items when they run out of cabin space. Is this what happened to you?

Seized my 23" LG travel monitor for 3 weeks, claiming it was a potential bomb.

Fortunately I was in Israel for 4 months, so a minor inconvenience in the scheme of things, but still, seemed a bit over the top...until I stepped out of the airport and saw teenagers wielding machine guns (serving in military), the Israelis aren't messing around ;-)

If you're Israeli I'd imagine the security measures aren't nearly as stringent.

Because they just wanted to screw with me. They specifically didn't let me take on a paper file which had my invitation letter, citizenship copy and various other things that would have made my life easier at Ben Gurion.

They promised they'd put it on the plane and they didn't. I got it two or three days later as El Al doesn't fly during Shabbat.

People with a little power and no supervision are likely to abuse it for their own ego. I doubt it's anything more than that.

Being singled out for invasive searching and questioning whenever you fly for no reason other than your ethnicity goes a little beyond "not being offended."

It's not simply (ed: only) based on ethnicity.

When people talk about banning "profiling" that's what they mean.

A credit score could be made more accurate if you included race and ethnicity, but current models are more accurate than one built simply on race and ethnicity. (This may simply be measuring the recial bias of society, but more data is almost always useful.)

Sure, it may offend people to include race, it's not required. EX: People without children are a higher risk than those with children. On it's own not a big deal, and you can't trust any one thing, but screening even 1 in 3 people is still vastly cheaper than everyone.

In the end we can be just as effective without including race if we simply spend more money to profile more people. Making more people suffer for little gain vs. standing up for your principles is less clear cut than people want to admit. Still, both options are viable.

It's definitely not. My dad had one of those 'extensive questioning' sessions the first time (and only the first time) he flew to Israel because (we think) he is former non-US military. He's also whiter than snow, basically the definition of Caucasian.

You're right that there are many ways to profile, but race and religion have been historically pervasive profiling techniques.

It does seem more fair to simply put everyone through the same process. If you're annoyed at why you (an innocent) have to be subjected to such stringent and time consuming security, that's how innocents who fit "the profile" might feel as well.

If those doing the profiling are interested in being successful, and race and religion prove to be ineffective indicators of threat, then such profiling should stop (or bombs will keep getting through at an inordinate rate). Otherwise, race and religion are simply observations about passengers which have value in directing attention.

Correlation != Causation

If we examine the background of anyone who has ever committed terrorism, every major race and religion would be covered. And so much of crime comes from social context, so at what point could you ever say: it's safe to assume that anyone with X ethnic background is not a threat. You can take any race and put them in a hostile, violent context and see them either continue the violence or die.

Or, if you say the majority of terrorists are men, so let's stop profiling women, I'm sure you would find more women committing terrorism. Then are women the greater threat or is it simply that we've made it harder for men to be terrorists?

I don't see a way to profile without affecting the statistics.

I agree with the gist of everything you've written here. And I think you're slightly missing the point.

> "so much of crime comes from social context"

Agreed. This is why I advocate taking that context into account. Not profiling would mean treating every single individual the exact same way, removing all social context from consideration.

> at what point could you ever say: it's safe to assume that anyone with X ethnic background is not a threat

This is not the point of profiling. The point is to build probability distributions, and hone them.

> I don't see a way to profile without affecting the statistics.

This is literally the point! You want to profile on such an exacting superset of factors (behavior, history, autonomous responses, forensics...) that you cause the incidence rate of terrorism to go down, across the board.

A brittle policy like "only screen middle eastern men" will of course get gamed, but that is terrible profiling. It builds a one-dimensional "profile"--you want a profile that is harder to fool, and based on actual behavioral cues.

> If those doing the profiling are interested in being successful, and race and religion prove to be ineffective indicators of threat, then such profiling should stop

I mean maybe if the profiling is being done by robots, but in reality I have my doubts.

I think humans can do this as well, they just need the right incentive structure (i.e. tied to actual results). CYA security theatre is not it.

I think the bias is too deeply ingrained to disappear without strong, sustained institutional pressure to avoid it.

I agree broadly that the Israeli model seems the one to follow. My understanding differs, however, in that it's not strictly profiling in the sense that carries heavy negative connotations in the US. I haven't traveled to Israel so can't comment, but I understand that in "profiling" the focus is on more objective metrics than an American might think when they hear the word -- e.g., physiological responses (sweating, increased heartrate, nervousness), consistency under questioning, etc.

If that's not the case, would you mind providing some details about your own experience, since you mentioned being pulled aside repeatedly?

None of those are the metrics they use. Despite being an Australian citizen with a very clean record, as well as having a very Western name, I was red flagged before I even arrived because of my country of birth.

With El Al, you're interrogated before you board the plane. When you go to check in, there is a "pre check-in" where you show staff your passport and they check your name off against a paper list. That paper list would already indicate whether or not you're going to be interrogated and at what level.

My coworker flying with me was also red flagged, and he was explicitly told it was because of my country of birth and that he was flying with me.

He had much less of a rough time than me, though, where I was being interrogated over where I got the 100 shekels they found in my wallet (apparently exchanging a nominal amount of Aussie dollars for shekels at Sydney airport "just in case" astounded El Al security, and it was much more likely that there was something much more sinister going on).

Thanks for the detail, and for your own experience.

The interrogation interests me. It sounds you don't feel it was useful? I had heard about this kind of interrogation over mundane stories, and understood it as a way of "testing" individuals' stories (especially under duress). But that would depend on it being repeated/prodded thoroughly, which it seems isn't the case.

It sounds like this interrogation strategy could be designed to make the interviewee think that the interlocutor is onto something, even if they aren't.

If you're a regular guy, you're likely to react by becoming bored and tired. If you're doing sinister stuff, there is a chance that you might start to stress out from the interaction. I believe similar techniques are used when screening people for government security clearances using a polygraph. They seem to push people hard and accuse them of lying. I can only assume it's with the intent of causing legitimately guilty people to "crack".

I am not trying to justify the practice, just speculating about the purported rationale. Not a very fun experience as an innocent person.

You're trying to justify it in the sense that they're some sort of smart people with a plan. They're just civilians, they're not spies. No malice or cunning elements to it - just idiocy.

The takeaway I got is that they just don't want people to visit Israel and made it as difficult as possible for me (which involved taking away my personal documentation, such as my invitation letter and copies of my citizenship, to give me a tough time when I got to Ben Gurion).

"Repeated/prodded thoroughly" matches all of the descriptions of the long-form interrogations by Israeli airline and airport security. If they got to the 100 shekels in his wallet, then that means they probably asked him about a lot of other things first, and searched his wallet, and probably tried to put together a timeline of exactly when he went where to try to find cracks in the story.

Not really. It was a standard run-of-the-mill search. The shekels are the only thing they were genuinely interested in. They couldn't comprehend why I had gotten it.

It was bizarre.

Weeeeeeeeeeeird.

But then, I'm Jewish Israeli, so I don't have a lot of first-person experience with the full interrogation experience, just second-hand accounts from both sides of the table.

This is the theory that I'd heard behind the strategy. Having not experienced it myself, I'm curious how it plays out in practice. It seems they have a high true positive rate and low false negative (i.e., properly suspecting people who should be suspected), but perhaps also a somewhat high false positive rate? This still would be favorable in my eyes to the security in America.

The "interrogation" felt more like they didn't want me to visit Israel again. Genuinely, that was the only take away I had.

They tried to intimidate me with their faux "all seeing eye" - asking about whether or not I trained judo (in reference to the jiu-jitsu Gi I had in my luggage) but aside from that, the questions about the shekels in my wallet and also taking issue with the rubber waistband on my pants, they didn't really ask about anything else. The shekels thing and the issue they took with it was just absurd.

It was really just civilian employees on a power trip trying to mess with me... because they can.

> physiological responses (sweating, increased heartrate, nervousness), consistency under questioning, etc.

Is this what Canadian border guards are supposed to be doing? I hate dealing with them, and therefore minimize my border crossings. I just want to pour money into the Canadian economy as a tourist from time to time, and actual Canadian cops (RCMP) are much less aggressive than their US counterparts, but the border crossing is almost always unnecessarily miserable.

Who decides the profiles?