Which Is the Lesser Evil: Airport “Porno Scanners” or Profiling?

From TSA website: Click to enlarge (you know you want to).
Images more explicit than this may be faked.

If you look up “droll” in the dictionary, there ought to be a picture of George Will.   Here’s the end of his current column, which kvetches about increased airport security:

The average American has regular contact with the federal government at three points – the IRS, the post office and the TSA. Start with that fact if you are formulating a unified field theory to explain the public’s current political mood.

Will joins Kathleen Parker and Charles Krauthammer in a trifecta of WashPo conservative columnists opposed to the new screening procedures.  Here’s Parker describing the unappealing choices:

I don’t like the idea of some stranger – regardless of whether he or she can see my face – examining my concessions to gravity without my permission. …

As to the alternative, no thank you. The idea of a stranger, even one of the same sex, foraging around my private principalities is simply unacceptable. Forget the creepiness factor, which is sufficient; consider the principle – quickly! – before you get used to the notion that government has the right to do Whatever Is Necessary To Protect You.

From what, if not this?

Krauthammer thinks he knows a better way:

We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety – 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling – when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches.

Profiling doesn’t have to mean racial profiling — although, speaking strictly from a security point of view, obviously it would make sense to give a higher level of scrutiny to young male Middle Eastern Muslims.  Michael Totten, the independent journalist, describes how the Israelis keep their planes and airports safe:

Security officials should pay less attention to objects, and more attention to people.

The Israelis do. They are, out of dreadful necessity, the world’s foremost experts in counterterrorism. And they couldn’t care less about what your grandmother brings on a plane. Instead, officials at Ben Gurion International Airport interview everyone in line before they’re even allowed to check in.

And Israeli officials profile. They don’t profile racially, but they profile. Israeli Arabs breeze through rather quickly, but thanks to the dozens of dubious-looking stamps in my passport — almost half are from Lebanon and Iraq — I get pulled off to the side for more questioning every time. And I’m a white, nominally Christian American.

If they pull you aside, you had better tell them the truth. They’ll ask you so many wildly unpredictable questions so quickly, you couldn’t possibly invent a fake story and keep it all straight. Don’t even try. They’re highly trained and experienced, and they catch everyone who tries to pull something over on them.

Grousing about the scanners is all well and good, but the danger is not theoretical — there was an actual incident of a bomb hidden in a man’s underwear. Next time I fly, I’ll shrug and walk through the scanner, if that’s what I’m told to do.

5 thoughts on “Which Is the Lesser Evil: Airport “Porno Scanners” or Profiling?

  1. Circle this weekend in red! I read an article about how the Israelis handle security at airports and I actually AGREE the way they do it is better. Who thought we’d see the day?

    I agree the methods described in the article I think you’re referencing are not profiling. Everybody gets the same question, no problem.

    Just simply asking where they’re from and where they’re going in a polite conversational manner goes a long way. At my urban library, we’ve found that greeting our customers at the door in a friendly conversational way goes a long way. We recognize the person as an individual instead of another faceless member of the great unwashed.

    When we really started doing this at the directions desk and security desk in the lobby, a lot of problem behavior vanished. Those who had been a problem suddenly felt (gasp) part of the community! By the time they reach the reference desk, they are much calmer. Mostly. There’s always one in every crowd.

    Better service, a greater sense of community, a better community. What’s not to like about this approach?

    One does have to wonder who is behind these amazing hi-tech machines whose sale to the government will bring in great profit. And what influence their lobbyists have on making policy.

    All that being said, I’m just not worried about scanners. Which surprises me. Meh.

    Kirk, you’re still my favorite conservative!

  2. Bookie, I’m probably your ONLY conservative. But thanks 🙂

    Even the Israelis don’t do extensive questioning of every passenger — they can’t. They’ve got to decide which passengers they want to pull aside for more scrutiny. It makes no sense to choose passengers at random, when, as Krauthammer said, “the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known.”

  3. Okay, so you can tell that they’ve got their butts clenched, but can you actually tell if they’ve got anything unusual on (or in) ’em?

    I’m ready to stop traveling until this insanity is over.

  4. A blog I read regularly is Schneier on Security. Down to earth, factual discussion by an expert. Here’s a longish post of his from 2005 that addresses profiling:

    http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/profiling.html

    A key quote”

    “Ethics aside, institutionalized profiling fails because real attackers are so rare: Active failures will be much more common than passive failures. The great majority of people who fit the profile will be innocent. At the same time, some real attackers are going to deliberately try to sneak past the profile. During World War II, a Japanese American saboteur could try to evade imprisonment by pretending to be Chinese. Similarly, an Arab terrorist could dye his hair blond, practice an American accent, and so on.”

    And

    “Still, no matter how much a government makes it illegal, profiling does occur. It occurs at an individual level, at the level of Diana Dean deciding which cars to wave through and which ones to investigate further. She profiled Ressam based on his mannerisms and his answers to her questions. He was Algerian, and she certainly noticed that. However, this was before 9/11, and the reports of the incident clearly indicate that she thought he was a drug smuggler; ethnicity probably wasn’t a key profiling factor in this case. In fact, this is one of the most interesting aspects of the story. That intuitive sense that something was amiss worked beautifully, even though everybody made a wrong assumption about what was wrong. Human intuition detected a completely unexpected kind of attack. Humans will beat computers at hinkiness-detection for many decades to come.

    And done correctly, this intuition-based sort of profiling can be an excellent security countermeasure. Dean needed to have the training and the experience to profile accurately and properly, without stepping over the line and profiling illegally. The trick here is to make sure perceptions of risk match the actual risks. If those responsible for security profile based on superstition and wrong-headed intuition, or by blindly following a computerized profiling system, profiling won’t work at all. And even worse, it actually can reduce security by blinding people to the real threats. Institutionalized profiling can ossify a mind, and a person’s mind is the most important security countermeasure we have.”

  5. Thanks David — Schneier’s blog is great, I’ve bookmarked it. I like his observation that profiling occurs despite laws against it, that’s pretty much what I’ve always assumed. He has a more recent post on the body scanners, in which he says:

    “if a group of well-planned and well-funded terrorist plotters makes it to the airport, the chance is pretty low that those blue-shirted crotch-groping water-bottle-confiscating TSA agents are going to catch them. The agents are trying to do a good job, but the deck is so stacked against them that their job is impossible. Airport security is the last line of defense, and it’s not a very good one.”

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