Profiling makes sense on public transportation

Recent terrorist bombings of buses and subway trains have Londoners known for their stoicism and tolerance demanding stronger measures by their government to prevent recurrences and to keep a closer eye on suspected Muslim extremists.

Vast majorities now support legislation that would make it tougher for imams to enter England and preach religious hatred in mosques. Newly armed police have become trigger-happy. The Blair government is scrambling to toughen Britain's antiterrorism laws.

Funny how a few pounds of explosives, strategically placed, can change the perspective of an entire city famous for its thumb-sucking multiculturalism.

Ripples from the July 7 London bombings have reached this side of The Pond, where authorities are monitoring people riding public transit, from the New York subway system to Metro-North trains, even the Block Island ferries.

Authorities in New York City and Connecticut have begun searching backpacks, luggage, briefcases and containers large enough to hold explosives. But it's clear from their tactics that they have failed to learn the lessons of the Homeland Security Department. They remain cowed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Raymond W. Kelly, New York City's police commissioner, promised "a systematized approach" of random checks not based on race, ethnicity or religion, even though the people most apt to blow up a subway station are of a single ethnicity and religion.

This is the way passenger screenings at airports began after 9/11. Those random searches led to the arrest of a grandmother in a wheelchair and more than a thousand other "terrorists" armed with such deadly weapons as nail clippers and knitting needles. Meanwhile, a test in 2003 by the Transportation Security Administration found that screeners found concealed knives only 70 percent of the time and missed one in four guns.

The trouble with random searches is they don't allow authorities to narrow the field of suspects based on easily identifiable traits. But at least New York City and Connecticut have the courage to do them. Transit officials in Boston, Washington, San Francisco and elsewhere say they are uncertain such searches are legal, a position supported by the ACLU because "one of the dangers of random searches is that they can invite the possibility of racial, ethnic or religious profiling."

Well, if a cabal of elderly women in wheelchairs was suspected of plotting to blow up a Block Island ferry, it would make sense to stop every elderly woman in a wheelchair trying to board.

The ACLU's hyperventilation notwithstanding, the vast majority of Americans, including law-abiding Muslims, are willing to put up with the occasional inconvenience of searches if it helps prevent atrocities or simply puts people's minds at ease that their government is "doing something" to combat terrorism at home. This is about the country keeping its guard up, not about "trampling the Constitution" as the ACLU asserts.

The alternative is to surrender their lives and liberties to extremists who believe the only good American is a dead American.

One more go round on this false issue of ‘Racial Profiling’…

There is no such thing. It would be pointless and idiotic to ‘profile’ race. Race is assumed one of the most directly observable characteristics of a human – and generally, there would be no reason to construct a profile to predict or classify race. While it is true that some misclassification is present in the everyday typing of race by visible characteristics – for the most part no one needs to use a scorecard or profile to make a pretty good guess at race.

A profile is a tool, a template, against which to compare individuals and assess the probability that they are involved in something you want to scrutinize and interdict (drug smuggling, terrorism, etc.). It is not a perfect predictor – just an efficient screening device. To be minimally efficient it needs to be only slightly better than random chance assignment. A good system needs to be much better than random chance – not only because of the extraordinary levels of damage that a terrorist can accomplish – leveraged by nuclear, radiological or biological technologies – but also because 99.9+% of those screened are not terrorists and to burden them unduly lays a very heavy cost in terms of inefficiency on the vast majority of the traveling public.

Before 9/11/2001 there was a need to screen air travelers and border crossers for drug courier activity. Hence, there were ‘drug courier profiles’ – models that aimed to sort out the mass of air travelers or border crosses and rank them on the probability that they were drug couriers. These models were based on actual experience of persons stopped in airports or at border crossing stations. You build a model with multiple variables (origin-destination pair, elapsed trip time, time at destination, method of payment, country of origin, number of days in advance of flight payment is made, etc.) which, taken together, form a predictive score than can be used to segment high probability (…of being a drug courier) from low probability.

The entire purpose of profiling is to focus limited police, border patrol, DEA or FBI (and now DHS and TSA) resources on those who are most likely to be drug couriers (or terrorists, or illegal aliens, etc.)

The use of the term ‘racial profiling’ has been an attempt by Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, et. al. to make an issue out of something that does not exist. It is really a very silly thing to assert that such a thing exists or is a serious issue. To allow the continual trafficking of such a false label in the major media without challenge is shameless.

If police were arbitrarily stopping individuals simply because they are black – they are not using a profile. And if they are using a properly constructed profile – they may be stopping black people – but not simply because they are black. Rather it would be because other characteristics of their travel, or their situation at the time of a border crossing, or their manner of travel were highly correlated with drug courier or terrorist behavior.

Building a screening model for air terrorism will be difficult. The 19 who did commit terrorist acts on 9/11/2001 were cast against a background of perhaps millions who were to fly that day who did not. The sparseness of the data makes building a statistical model difficult. Other techniques – such as neural networking can be used to mine data – but there again, the number of instances of actual terrorists observed to contribute data for model development is very small. Terrorists of the Al Qaeda variety have developed organizational cells and methods (cash exchange by hand) which minimize the transactional trail which can be monitored.

In lieu of statistically or neural network derived models – judgmental models will have to do. A rational development of a judgmental model is accomplished by taking the common characteristics of known terrorists and generalizing them as characteristics in a model or profile to screen for likely terrorists.

Other efforts to screen terrorists will come from analysis of patterns in credit card usage and perhaps even cell phone usage or even electric power consumption. Patterns in large datasets can be examined to find the particular elements that isolate a high concentration of likely terrorists.

The ignorant reflex against profiling is just that - but if we are stupid enough to listen to those who reject profiling as a concept (e.g., the ACLU)- we are in danger. It's that simple.

Furthermore - if the ACLU attempts by litigation to make the contents of the profile "scorecard" public - its value will be destroyed. These terrorists are quite sophisticated - and the minute they understand that the least likely person to incur scrutiny is, say, a Scandinavian female in her 60's - that's when they'll go recruit one.

Someone sent me an e-mail with a multiple choice "test." It listed about 17 questions about terorist attacks, starting with "Who held Israeli athletes hostage at the 1972 Munich Olympics and ended up killing them all?" The last question was, "Who were the suicide bombers on the London subway this summer?"

The first three answers offered for each question were always a gag and no answer was offered twice: the king of Sweden, Ann Coulter, the Boy Scouts, the rock group Def Leppard, David Letterman, Chelsea Clinton, ACT-UP, General Motors, the Chicago Cubs, Mahatma Gandhi, etc.

But the fourth answer was always, "D. Male Muslim radicals between the ages of 17 and 40." And that was always the correct answer for each of the questions.

Let's not be stupid in our quest to preserve individual liberties. I am going to add a few other qualifiers to that profile. First, they are either traveling alone or in small groups with other young men. There are never women or children with them.

Second, the passport will most likely show a stamp from Afghanistan or Pakistan, and the man spent a considerable amount of time there.

Third, the man is not a native-born citizen of a Western country. He is either a naturalized citizen or a citizen of a foreign country. Furthermore, he was born in a nation where the population is mostly Muslim: probably in the Middle East or North Africa, but possibly Indonesia.

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