Posted on 08/15/2006 4:55:38 PM PDT by mdittmar
The prospect of extra security checks for airline passengers on race and religion was being played down by UK government insiders on Tuesday for fear of alienating the Muslim community.
Passenger profiling is believed to be among a number of options being considered by ministers who are reviewing security at UK airports following the disruption resulting from last week’s alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners. But the proposal has sparked criticism from Muslim groups, and police groups have refused to back the idea.
Passenger profiling, including security screening according to religion or ethnicity, would be designed to allow security staff to focus on the most likely terrorist suspects. Those passengers would then face more stringent checks before being allowed to board flights.
Though profiling would also include factors such as behaviour and travel patterns, the government is wary of introducing security screening with an ethnic component as it could alienate the very community the security sources rely on to provide intelligence about potential terror attacks.
John Denham, chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, said: “It seems to me that it’s likely to prove problematic. The sort of people involved in terrorist activities don’t tend to fit a certain pattern and include people of all races and potentially different ages.
“From a security point of view, it could prove to be quite misleading and from a political point of view, it could be a sensitive issue. The government have got to consider everything. … But it is likely to be counter- productive and cause great difficulties in applying it in practice.”
The Association of Chief Police Officers also warned that “stereotyping” terror suspects could “create a gap” in policing for terrorists to exploit.
“We consider that assuming the threat of terrorism to come from a particular ethnicity, faith, gender or age range would create a gap in our policing response that could be exploited by terrorists. Therefore, we brief staff carefully around these issues to ensure that stereotyping does not happen.”
However, some security and aviation industry experts said profiling could bring significant benefits for airlines and airport operators. Ascend, an aviation consultancy, said an efficient, co-ordinated profiling system could speed check-in times and reduce costs for airlines an airports.
It said: “Passenger profiling is not about invading privacy but it is about finding procedures whereby frequent travellers at the very least can go through some form of registration process, using biometric and screening procedures to bypass extra stringent security checks.”
While civil rights organisations have criticised the US government for implementing policies they say border on racial profiling, the US Transport Administration Authority says it does not use racial profiling to screen passengers at airports in the US.
David Heyman, director of the homeland security programme at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, said the US implemented new policies to screen passengers at airports in the wake of the 2001 September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. But he says the government abandoned the initial programme after it came under heavy criticism from civil liberties groups, who argued that the criteria used by the government to select high-risk passengers were likely to select a higher proportion of Muslims than other groups.
Stewart Verdery, former assistant secretary for homeland security, said the US public would “not stomach” pure racial profiling. But pointed out that the US does have a programme called National Security Entry/Exit Registration System, which imposes special requirements on citizens of certain countries, most of which have predominantly Muslim populations.
Mr Heyman adds TSA agents are increasingly being trained in using behavioural characteristics – a technique used widely in Israel – to identify potential terror suspects. But he says it is reasonable to assume that some screeners pay more attention to members of ethic and religious groups that are identified with terror attacks in the US and the UK.
Dennis Murphy, former spokesman at the department of homeland security, who agrees that racial profiling is ineffective, says monitoring behavioural patterns of passengers would be a much more effective way of identifying potential terror suspects.
I am not familiar EU politics,but if there is a grain of truth in this,what will it take for us on both sides of the pond to wake up and quit this p.c. crap??
This is the quote that scares me,
“We consider that assuming the threat of terrorism to come from a particular ethnicity, faith, gender or age range would create a gap in our policing response that could be exploited by terrorists. Therefore, we brief staff carefully around these issues to ensure that stereotyping does not happen.”
Who cares what the Arabs and Muslems think? They are completely incapable and unwilling to police themselves. They are not being sensitive to the rest of the world in my opinion. Run every single of them through the ringer. The wierd thing about this liquid ban is that they can easily hide the liquid in plastic vials in their pants or underwear, without a full search.
I think they are trying to emphasize, the blond and blue will be sent in if they start relying too much on Mid East stereotypes.
Phony Religion of Peace "Civil Rights" leaders have been against almost every anti-terror measure in Western countries.
remember this from 2002?
Jihadists change terror stereotype; Iran and al-Qaeda have been recruiting and training brigades of blond, blue-eyed jihadists with Bosnian military experience to wage war against the West - World: war on terror
Insight on the News, Dec 10, 2002 by Scott L. Wheeler
On Oct. 24, police arrested two men they believe to be the Beltway snipers of Washington. At least one of them, John Allen Muhammad, is a Muslim. For now, authorities are not commenting on published reports that Muhammad and his juvenile accomplice, John Lee Malvo, were connected to jihadist terrorist organizations. But before anything was known about Muhammad and Malvo, federal investigators had been on the alert for another potential suspect--a Bosnian deserter from the French military. During the Beltway-sniper investigation, terrorism experts told INSIGHT about the missing soldier and his potential expertise as an assassin. For police investigators desperate for clues that might lead to the perpetrators, it may have seemed like a long shot. But to counterterrorism experts concerned about homeland defense, it was part of an expected new face of terrorism.
To most Americans these days the label "terrorist" conjures up images of swarthy men of Middle Eastern descent. But experts tell INSIGHT that, with help from Iran, their enablers Osama bin Laden and his top deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri have recruited and trained brigades of blond, blue-eyed Bosnians and indoctrinated them for martyrdom. Both bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have in recent days been heard on tape recordings threatening more terrorist attacks against the United States.
5
How did this moron get into a position of authority???
A large number of the terrorists came from the same mosque...But that's not a factor here...
There are two groups to fear...The mudlims and the gov't...
Yeah, so keep looking out for those Black Amish Grandmas.
If I was muslim, and I was not a terrorist I would be happy to undergo an inconvenience to persecute people who are giving my religion a bad name. Where are these so called moderate muslims???? This logic clearly spells out that there are no innocent muslims, if they are not terrorists themselves they at the very least support what the terrorists are doing. We are at war with islam, not just radical islam.
Then you still haven't learned your lesson.
Sooner or later, you're going to have to risk "alienating" these vermin or you're going to have to lay down and die.
I know which one I would choose.
Let's worry about the blond hairs later,we haven't even got the middle east muslim part right yet.
I did not suggest that we stop searching for other people, but it is idiotic not to do full racial profiling for people who do fit the mold.
I think the message is, don't drop your guard.
I meant to add the article to the thread. You snuck in while I was posting :)
I think the message is p.c. will kill us.
You have seen Michael Jackson, right? :P
Good Point! ;)
I think the possibility of those type of recruits is vastly outweighed by the needle in a haystack factor of treating ALL passengers to the same diluted level of scrutiny.
Limited resources, limited ability to scrutinize, limited ability to delay and inconvenience all passengers, dictate that profiling be used to limit the universe and subject the dangerous few to the highest level of scrutiny.
Besides the EL AL Israeli model has profiles for the blond and blue eyed.
....................
In 1986 a Palestinian terrorist, Nezar Hindawi, tried to blow up an Israeli airliner by sending his pregnant Irish girlfriend on board with a bomb in her luggage. The El Al screeners in London profiled a young pregnant woman traveling alone as suspicious, and found the bomb of which she had been blissfully unaware.
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/newsviews.cgi/Intelligence/_Profiling___A_Nece.writeback
Hey, I'm still not convinced that Timothy McVeigh didn't convert to Islam.
McVeigh can be tied to Sahim Alwan of the lack 6 from a security guard job. And in the Phillipines, McVeigh coordinated with Abu Sayyaf.
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