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You Have Been 'Randomly' Selected?
dpbsmith asks: "One thing I've noticed is that the people who are told by the TSA that they have been 'randomly' selected for baggage inspection have a tendency not to believe it. I know one couple whose wife has been 'randomly' selected four times, while the husband never has been. The wife believes that it is because each of those times, she was traveling by herself, without checked baggage, (whereas she has never been inspected when traveling with her husband with checked baggage). In 'Uncommon Carriers', John McPhee accompanied a truck driver to write about the experience, and bought a trucker's cap to blend in. He says 'I would pay for my freedom at the Seattle-Tacoma airport when, with a one-way ticket bought the previous day, I would arrive to check in my baggage.' His baggage was 'randomly' selected for inspection, and later he was 'once again "randomly selected" for a shoes-off, belt-rolled, head-to-toe frisk.' So, what about it? Is the TSA simply flat-out lying when they tell you that you have been 'randomly selected?'" The better question to ask is: "Are random searches effective in keeping everyone safe?"
There's two seperate questions here:
If 'enough' random searches are done then I expect they would be effective. Clearly, it is unresonable to search everybody so it's a trade-off between cost, time and hastle. The exact number of searches you conduct will depend precisely on how you way up these trade-offs. It will also depend on how much training your provide to the people conducting the searches.
I believe that profile-driven searches are flawed. The flaw is that the attacker can always avoid the profile you're trying to detect. For example, if I profile for young Muslim men with turbans the attacker can simply pick disaffected white middle-class women. Sure, such people are hard to come by but it is fool-hardy to suggest that they do not exist.
Profiling by race and religion flies in the face of everything we've struggled to achieve in the last century. I think it was Martin Luther King who said:
Those words transcend race, religion and colour. We should not judge because a man reads the Koran any more than we should judge because he is Black. Muslims are not terrorists. To quote another great mind, master Yoda:
There's already a dark cloud gathering. The question is how dark can it get?
Simon.
Also, there's the fact that you can't tell who's Muslim just by looking at them.
Agreed 100%. There are muslims of pretty much all ethnic groups. It'd be the simplest thing for them to hang up a cross on their neck and stuff a bible on their pockets. Racial profiling wouldn't do much good there.
It might be a fluke, but whenever I tried to board a plane with a 3 or 4 days beard, I was "randomly" selected for further inspection (including swabbing my luggage for drugs at the destination, go figure). Whenever I go clean shaven, I pass right thru. I havent' flown that much so, as I said, it might be a fluke.
No sig
The whole mentality behind searching people to get on a airplane promotes false security. We can't even stop weapons in our prisons, and we will NEVER be able to stop deadly weapons on airplanes.
What we need to do is come to the realization that the ONLY way to make technically fragile public transit work is to promote an atmosphere where people do not want to attack us, instead of trying to prevent the few who do from being able to. "They" will always be able to, especially with increasingly cheap and effective technology.
You can think about it in terms of game theory.
An important concept in game theory is the mixed strategy. That is where you randomise over certain choices because it is optimal to do so to prevent your pattern of play being anticipated and counteracted by your opponent. (Consider a game of matching pennies - you choose heads or tails and reveal it simultaneously to your opponent. If they match you win, if they don't your opponent winds. The optimal strategy is to randomly pick 50/50 heads and tails. Skillful players of games in general are ones that can a) randomise themselves properly, and b) exploit the fact that their opponents don't randomise properly)
Thus, in the case of 'random' searches it needs to be random to ensure that the searching strategy can't be circumvented. But that doesn't mean that the odds of every given person being selected need to be the same. For example, if it is much harder for terrorists to convince mothers with young children to become scuicide bombers that means that they are less likely to do so or, completely dispasionately, if they do there will be fewer terrorist attacks because they have fewer volunteers. This would still be better than the alternative. Importantly, for the discussion here it is provably optimal to do this.
Thus, an optimal screening strategy is random, but the probability of selection need not be uniform.
(And a statistics aside: even though the chance that someone who flies 4 times gets selected every time would seem to be 1/10000 - if they individual odds are 1/10 - given that over 10,000 people fly, you are almost guaranteed that someone will be selected 4 times in a row.)
You're absolutely right, not protecting ourselves against known threats would be suicidal.
On the other hand, doing provocative, stupid things that are guaranteed to turn otherwise friendly or neutral people into our enemies is equally suicidal.
The whole "fuck what everybody thinks, we'll keep ourselves secure through military force alone" mentality is based on the assumption that we have the physical ability to do so. The hard truth, however, is that that simply isn't the case -- our military can barely keep the lid on Iraq, let alone any of the other 3-4 dozen countries where terrorism is a concern. Our only option is to enlist the aid of the rest of the world's governments and people in helping us stop terrorism. The good news is that that shouldn't be too difficult to do -- almost nobody likes terrorists. But to work with people (or governments), you have to treat them with respect -- in particular, you have to understand that it's a two-way street. Double-standards do not go unnoticed by the world's public.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"If you really consider that terrorism." What the hell? Honestly, what definition of the term do you use, such that McVeigh doesn't qualify?
The analogy from the talking head also fails to make sense, because we're not looking for the nineteen guys who executed the September 11th hijackings. We already know what happened to them, and they're beyond the reach of our justice. What we're looking for are people who might be attempting to do something similar. A less superficial analogy would have your one-armed bank robber cracking his skull open on the sidewalk as he exited the bank, and having the bank respond by demanding all people with missing limbs undergo a background check before opening a checking account.
There are a dozen reasons why racial profiling is counterproductive. My primary objection is that it feeds the belief among many Muslims that the "War on Terror" is really a war on Islam, and as such it makes even moderate Muslims more inclined to be our enemies than our allies.
But even if we ignore that it may be creating new potential attackers, it's ineffective at thwarting a given attack. First, there is the fact that whatever profile you select, the attackers will be able to learn how not to match the profile, even if that requires skin lightener, fake IDs, and voice training. More likely, though, the attackers would look for someone who sympathized with the cause, but didn't fit the profile. Beyond that, a focus on skin color is going to distract from more useful indicators, like behavior. Given the choice between screening the scruffy Arab and the white businessman, I'd search the one who is shaking and sweating like the proverbial whore in Sunday School.
In the end, the best way to avoid another September 11 is not to seek out and destroy those who hate us, or to closely scrutinize every person who reminds us of someone who hated us in the past. We can't lock down the 'bad guys' to the point where the 'good guys' are completely safe, because there is no such clear distinction, and we're in danger of losing our freedom as we make the attempt. Consider that it won't be remotely possible to secure every conceivable vector of attack. If we lock down air travel, our buses are still vulnerable. If we stop everyone from buying explosives and their precursors, they can fall back on our abundant firearms. If we protect our stadiums, they can go after malls, hospitals, dams, etc. Targeted assassinations, random arson, destruction of fiber optic cables and power lines... and that's leaving out the scenarios where something manufactured abroad is snuck into the country.
No, our best defense is to reduce the number of people who passionately hate us, and are willing to act on their anger. Killing them doesn't work--not on the scale that any reasonable person is willing to contemplate--because even the people who hate us are still people, people with families and friends who will learn hate as they watch us butcher their loved ones.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
How is this comment insightful? Please explain this more. I see this comment is driven by the fundamentalist, black -n- white mentality that drives most of the current insanity.
First, you are fear mongering: using single incidents and news reports to support statements about whole nations.
Second, you are ignoring that there is a wide and available gap between peace and appeasement.
Our options are not just "appease" or "war" - there is a huge middle ground. It used to be called "diplomacy".
When I say "an atmosphere where people do not want to attack us" - don't assume that only can occur because they love us - just that others don't hate us SO MUCH they are willing to die for their cause. Everyone living in peace and love would be great (but to get there we need to eliminate property entirely) - and we should shoot for that, but it's not feasible in the short term. There are lots of ways to get to the place where people don't want to attack you. It takes a LOT of fear and hate and misery to get a group of people who are so downtrodden and lost they resort to suicide bombing.
>The hard truth, however, is that that simply isn't the case -- our military can barely keep the lid on Iraq, let alone any of the other 3-4 dozen countries where terrorism is a concern.
Make no mistake: Our military is quite capable of dealing with Iraq, or just about any other nation on earth.
The problem lies in that no one has the stomach for really turning them loose to do just that, and thanks to the speed of modern news networks, no one can get away with Dresdens or Hiroshimas anymore.
Steve
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