November 23rd, 2010
The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson offers a particularly silly defense of the TSA’s pat-down regime, though, to his credit, he does understand that the issue is really about profiling. Here’s Robinson:
Our terrorist enemies may be evil but they’re not stupid.
If we only search people who “look like terrorists,” al-Qaeda will send people who don’t fit the profile. It’s no accident that most of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were from Saudi Arabia; at the time, it was easier for Saudi nationals to get U.S. visas than it was for citizens of other Arab countries. If terrorists are clever enough to hide powerful explosives in ink cartridges, then eventually they’ll find a suicide bomber who looks just like you, me or Granny.
Robinson is wrong on so many levels. For starters, many of the recent terrorist plots have failed because the would-be terrorists were stupid. Surely some jihadis are smart. Others are not.
As for the question of finding willing suicide bombers who look like Everyone Else, that, too, is foolish. It’s entirely plausible that a white 20- or 30-something might be an Adam Gadahn-style jihadist. It’s also possible that a middle-aged black man (like Robinson) might be a jihadist. But no one is seriously arguing that profiling should totally bypass these groups.
But I suspect that it would be nearly impossible for terrorists to find a suicide bomber who looks like an elderly Chinese woman. Or a 2-year-old child. Or a teen-age Maori girl. Or a 70-year-old Swedish man.
Further, Robinson seems totally unaware that the system used by the Israelis rests as much on behavioral as demographic profiling. Here’s how behavioral pattern recognition (BPR) works:
In 1986, Anne-Marie Murphy, a pregnant, 32-year-old Irish lass, was on her way to board a London flight to Israel, where she was to marry her Arab fiance. After passing through several security checks, she was stopped for a targeted conversation by Israeli security because she stuck out: Pregnant women do not often travel long distances alone. Authorities became more interested in her because of the evasive answers she gave. Turns out, she had a bomb in her carry-on bag.
What made the BPR success so impressive in Murphy’s case is that she didn’t even know that she had a bomb on her. (Her fiance had packed it without her knowledge, happy to make his fiance and unborn child into unwilling martyrs.)
Now, maybe you think that profiling–which involves both demographic and behavioral scrutiny-is a bridge too far and that it presents an undue burden on our liberties without providing enough of a marginal increase in security. That’s an argument that Eugene Robinson should feel free to make.
But somehow, I don’t think that’s what he was going for.
Al Dente November 23, 2010 at 11:49 am
Hi Jonathan!
The TSA Program to Examine Random Voyagers (PERV) has attracted some rather unsavory characters to their ranks…..SHOCKING details at
:http://spnheadlines.blogspot.com/2010/03/faa-tiger-will-work-airport-security_19.html
Happy Thanksgiving, and Peace! 🙂