[green_lunch]

We had virtually no airline security in the 1970s and there were hijack attempts every couple of months..including innocent people dying and a plane that was eventually blown up with no passengers on board.

I sure as hell wouldn't fly if this was going on now.

The real problem is that we aren't allowed to profile.

Because we can't focus on a specific subset of travelers that are suspicious (based on data or behavior), everyone is treated as a threat and we get long lines as a result.

We can learn a lot from Israel:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-wagner/what-israeli-air...

They probably have more terrorist threats than anyone else in the world and have prevented nearly all attacks without the long lines. Mostly through a combination of profiling and hiring specially trained agents instead of $10/hour rent-a-cops to handle security. There's a reason why European Airports are targeted for attack, even though Israel is the main target.

At some point we need to make a choice: political correctness or safety.

[cbd1984]

Tying profiling to political correctness means you want racial profiling or similar, which would have such a huge false negative and false positive rate as to be worse than useless. Besides, I'm sure the TSA already de facto does it, because sentiments like yours are so common.

If you want to profile, ignore political correctness and do it based on something other than race, religion, or national origin.

[Vraxx]

This x1000. I generally concur that there will need to be sacrifices in terms of false positives inconveniencing people by "profiling" them, but I seriously doubt that race, religion, and/or national origin is the best metric we can come up with for profiling reasons. Honestly, I think there's a strong parallel with the way we see neural networks "play" games without following the heuristics that work best for our brains (which we have seen historically that human generated heuristics are not optimal heuristics).

And what else is the intention of profiling except to create a good enough "heuristic"? Let's strive for a better heuristic please.

[green_lunch]

"other than race, religion, or national origin."

Let's look at the terror watch list: I can bet 9/10 people on the list are from similar middle eastern countries, similar skin color and are from the same or similar religion.

Profiling based on this information isn't profiling based on any of these things, but based on risk factors and previous history.

The problem is that you can't even profile based on obvious history without also being accused of profiling based on religion or skin color.

This is what I'm talking about when I refer to 'political correctness'. Suspicious people can't be singled out without the PC police coming out in full force.

"ignore political correctness and do it based on something other than race, religion, or national origin."

I wish the terrorists bombing planes and killing innocent people were from different countries with different religions, but it's just not reality.

[dionidium]

It can't possibly have a higher false positive rate than literally treating every person the same. When the first old white lady commits an act of terrorism, then let's screen them, but until then, let's not.

That's an extreme example, but if you agree that we don't need to look at old white ladies, then we both agree that profiling is preferable. All that's left to discuss are the boundaries.

[jrs235]

I'm fairly sure the Israeli profiling is based on profiling behavior. Highly trained and skilled agents looked for body language tells.

[WillPostForFood]

Of course Israel racially/religiously profiles.

So why, I asked, are we still allowed to board airplanes at Ben-Gurion International Airport with bottles and tubes of liquid brought from home, while in Heathrow or JFK they confiscate our face cream and toothpaste? "Oh, that's simple," he answered matter of factly. "We use racial profiling, they don't." read more: http://www.haaretz.com/in-israel-racial-profiling-doesn-t-wa...

[bqe]

This is exactly wrong. Profiling does not increase safety whatsoever. Bruce Schneier argues it much better than I would:

> If the choice is between random searching and profiling, then random searching is a more effective security countermeasure. But Dunn is correct above when he says that there are some enormous trade-offs in liberty. And I don't think we're getting very much security in return.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/searching_bag...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/profiling.htm...

[green_lunch]

"This is exactly wrong. Profiling does not increase safety whatsoever. Bruce Schneier argues it much better than I would:"

You may say it doesn't 'increase safety', but Israel is a great example of it working. The attacks, hijacks, and deaths have nose dived to nearly 0. They have a hybrid system that involves both random checking and profiling.

I'm not saying we should lock up anyone that fits a specific racial profile. The problem is that when we use data and risk assessment to question specific people that may be suspicious, it's seen as racist if the person is anything but white.

The two articles you linked mention hijackers that happened pre-911. I don't think people are hijacking planes and diverting them to central america nor do we have IRA militants bombing planes.

We need a hybrid system between random checking and profiling. Random checks work so far, but will not help with long lines because everyone needs to be checked equally.

To reduce long lines, we either need to scale-back security (which is a bad idea) or use information and data to make the process more efficient (IE: profiling).

Some profiling is a good thing, but we can't completely rely on it.

[askldfhjkasfhd]

Israel is also a fairly close ethnicity, nothing like the diversity here in the US. And they are engaged in a struggle with a specific ethnicity that they can identify.

The US has so much more diversity in population and enemies that profiling would be less effective, more annoying/discriminatory, because the "us/them" divide is less clear here.

[dogma1138]

Israel profiles single white young European women as higher risk than "middle-eastern" young men based on past experience. Israel is also very diverse ethnically even if you take the Jewish population, N. African, Black, Arab, European, Asia, Indian all Jews of various ethnic backgrounds.

The vast majority of airline related attacks against Israel were not perpetrated by Arabs, and the only one on Israeli soil was executed by a Japanese.

While I'm sure Israel's profiling metrics do take in ethnicity by all accounts it has little to no weight and metrics based on past attacks, your behavior and more importantly your general background and travel history play a much bigger role.

But that said the US can't adopt the Israeli approach, the security check at Ben Gurion might look fast but it's because they have more security staff than JFK and a 3 (4 if you count the fact that Israeli security gets the passenger manifest before any flight takes place) layered security screening that starts way before you even reach the terminal.

Israel's approach can work in the US and everywhere else but it would cost billions to implement and bloat the size of the TSA to rival the size of the US Armed forces, the TSA is already about twice the size if not bigger than the FBI, it's bigger than the CIA and NSA combined but it's not even remotely big enough to do the same thing Israel does given number of passengers US airports handle each year.

[askldfhjkasfhd]

V interesting, thank you for your comment! It sounds like you have some knowledge in this area. Anything you'd recommend for me to read in the 30 minute timeframe that would level my knowledge up?

[dogma1138]

My GF used to be singled out on every flight to Israel, so I did some checking; the last attempted attack on an Israeli airline was a when a Syrian agent got a British woman pregnant and convinced her to fly to Israel not knowing that she had a bomb in her suitcase, in the majority of previous attacks European women often disguised as pregnant were used to smuggle the weapons past security (allot of Arab terrorist organizations of the from the 60's till the 80's were socialist and were aligned with the various left wing terrorist organizations in Europe).

About 5 years ago when I was living in Israel I've had an encounter with airport security myself I flew out to Amsterdam for a project, the project was canceled but as the flight was at 4am and the news arrived over the weekend I wasn't notified until I've actually landed.

So I didn't even leave the airport I just went to the KLM counter and booked a flight that left 3 hours later. When I landed 3 security agents were waiting for me at the door of the aircraft they had my details and they pulled me aside and questioned me about why did i book the flight last moment and why did i book the flight one way and some other details and it took me about 15 min to clear everything up.

To me this shows that they get notifications of last minute changes to the passenger lists as well as flag anyone who buys a one way ticket, both combined with potentially the fact that I flew out less than 12 hours before I got back probably raised enough red flags to come and question me immediately.

On that flight my carry on was searched after I landed and I was notified that my checked in baggage was not put on the flight and will be delivered to me later that day or the day after.

My personal theory is that they've suspected that I went to another airport that might have been compromised to get something that could be used in an attack at Ben Gurion.

The airline security is definitely top notch but the entire intelligence apparatus behind it won't be sustainable on any larger scale. The TSA can't afford hire 200,000 agents, the TSA can't afford to hire agents from elite military units and US intelligence and the TSA can't afford to have a college degree as a requirement for all but the most entry level jobs which them selves would require a hefty LEO/Military service background, and I don't think that running a background check on virtually every passenger in the US would be doable on both practical and legal grounds.