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.
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
> 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.
Presumably because the margin of safety for optimal aircraft operation is a lot thinner, and there's a high likelihood that a catastrophic failure results in everyone on board (usually several hundred people) dying.
In comparison, a regular train derailing (e.g. via a bomb, or whatever) isn't going to be as disastrous.
Edit: why the downvotes?
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.
Depends on how you define "children". E.g. see 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
You are, of course, correct that the frequencies for the various things here are not uniform.
In the USA??? I think the opposite is true. How many terrorist attacks have you had on US soil this year, and how many of the perpetrators identified as Christian vs Muslim?
Are you aware that the person I replied to described a scenario where 100% of attacks came from one group, and 0% from the rest? He was just as wrong as the straw man of me that you constructed.
> There have been Christian terrorists, yes, but those strike me as exceedingly rare compared to Muslim terrorists, for example.
I bet I know why it strikes you that way. And it's not because of actual real-world statistics based on what's actually happening in America. Check the numbers on terror attacks in the US- you might be surprised at the Muslim / Christian breakdown.
> Has a terrorist attack ever been carried out by a couple with children in the history of the world?
Yes, they have. And if we start waving couples with children through the security line, then yes, we will see it much more.
> how many terrorist attacks are carried out by women vs. men?
Yes. And if that's how we decide to bias our security, then we'll see a lot more women terrorists.
There are a lot of things that terrorists could do, but don't, in spite of lots of discourse like yours suggesting it would be effective for them. Bruce Schneier held contests for such suggestions, in order to highlight security theater, but also serving to point out that it's not remotely practical to guard against all reasonable threats. Since we're limiting the threats guarded against anyway, it might be better to guard specifically against those that have been experienced, rather than strip-searching grandma ( https://nypost.com/2019/06/06/tsa-humiliated-grandma-with-st... ) out of a pretense that it could be anyone... anyone at all.
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.
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.)
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.
the parent's assumption is "if you have any empathy for X people". from deir yassin to modern day. That assumption does not hold.
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.
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.
5 minutes if you decide to go along and reveal your entire digital life to the TSA.
Much like the no fly list which is a huge violation of due process.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/the_trouble_w...
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.
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.
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.
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.