Why Profiling Won’t Work
You got a better idea?
The recent failed bombing attempt by an agent of Al Qaeda has predictably resurrected the old profiling debate. The thrust of the conservative position on this issue has typically been that we should not worry about people’s feelings when people’s lives are at stake. The liberals, meanwhile, typically say that profiling violates people’s civil liberties and is immoral generally.
I would like to introduce a new argument against profiling that I have not heard discussed by the talking heads. It’s not about feelings, and it’s not about liberties. It’s about the most important question of all: will it actually work? Because, after all, if it just doesn’t work, then any discussion about its effect on people’s feelings, or its conformity with constitutional rights is meaningless.
What is profiling and will it work?
The basic idea behind profiling is that we should, during airport screenings, separate out and pay special attention to individuals who fit the profile of the kind of people who are out to kill us: young Arab Muslim extremist men. The question arises, how can we tell who is a young Arab Muslim man and who is not? Well, naturally, the response comes, it is through things like their skin and hair color, name, religion, and even clothing. Let’s see if profiling on any of these bases can actually work, over the long term.
Skin color: Arab people generally have brown skin. But so do millions of people of Latin American, African, South Asian, Southeast Asian and European origin. How do we distinguish who’s an Arab and who’s a Brazilian? It’s impossible, based on skin color or hair color (all of these people have dark hair, as well).
Name: there are certain names like Abdul, Muhammad or Abdullah that are Arab in origin, and are also taken by many non-Arab Muslims. But there are two problems here: (1) many non-Muslim (Arab Christians) and non-Arab people (Muhammad Ali, the boxer) have these kinds of names; many Muslim people do not have names of this type, and (2) it is safe to say that a terrorist intent on harm will have zero compunction to legally changing his name, but an average harmless person will not—therefore this policy, over time, will inevitably divert security’s attention away from the real threat, and toward the innocent.
Religion: the threat comes from people who are Muslim. Fair enough, but the overwhelming vast majority of people who travel, and who are Muslim, pose no threat. More to the point, how the hell are we supposed to tell who is a Muslim and who is not? Are security officials to ask for “passport and denomination, please” to every traveler? Even if such an absurd policy were to be implemented, can we not depend on the real terrorists to lie, and the innocent Muslim people to tell the truth, again diverting security away from the guilty and toward the innocent?
Clothing: many Muslims wear certain kinds of characteristic clothing. And there is nothing to stop a terrorist from dressing like a westerner, right? Consider, for example, Mohammed Atta:
I’m no fashion designer, but it looks like average western attire to me.
Facial features: now we are really digging. But let’s say we entertain the idea that Arab people have certain characteristic facial features (the structure of the face, the shape of the brow or nose, etc). Problems: (1) in the absence of highly-paid experts in this field stationed at countless airports, this is necessarily very subjective and basically impossible to exploit, (2) huge numbers of Arab people do not share “typical” facial features, indeed they may look like an average European person to the untrained eye (and even the “trained” eye), (3) the most recent terrorist attempt reminds us that our threat is a multiracial and multiethnic one—the guy was a black African, (4) any facial features that could be identified are unquestionably shared by people who are not Arab (consider Jews, Greeks or Italians, whose genetic stock have similar roots in the greater Mediterranean region).
Profiling will not help us
So we see there is no effective, reliable way to weed out the innocent from the guilty. Feelings be damned. If there were a reliable way for airport security personnel to make innocent civilians safer through profiling, I would say “the hell with political correctness—let’s get our priorities in order.” But I have demonstrated that there simply is not, given the nature of this threat. Profiling of this type, if implemented, may help for a little while. But over time, it will have at least two major negative consequences that will overwhelm any potential meagre gains: (1) it will further antagonize average, innocent Muslims and Arabs, thereby stoking violent extremism, and (2) it will lull us into a false sense of security, from which we will be jarringly awoken when one day a blue-eyed Polish-American man blows up an airplane in the name of Allah.
Indeed, we already have many examples of white or western people joining or trying to join Al Qaeda or similar groups. And yet we still have people suggesting that profiling people at airports will be effective. It is abundantly obvious that these terrorists will do whatever it takes to accomplish their mission. If we were to explicitly adopt some profiling regime of the type described above, we can rest assured that the dedicated Islamic militants will dye their hair, change their name, bleach their skin (they’re committing suicide, remember) and put on a different set of clothes. And since they are committing suicide, what’s a little plastic surgery to alter facial features, if they choose to go that far? Add some large sunglasses to further mask their face, a nice shave and some cologne and, voila, a modern white western man is just minding his own business going through airport security.
Many might respond saying “what about profiling based on nationality, background, past suspicious activity, etc.” News flash: we’re already doing that. If one says that we need to improve that whole system (the system that Idiocy Department Chief Janet Napolitano said “worked”), then that is a totally different issue, and I could not agree more.
But, the opponent might say, I have left out one very important trait: gender. The terrorists are overwhelmingly men. Surely there is room here for the diehard profiling lobbyist to snatch victory from the jaws of argumentative defeat, right? The answer: a resounding… maybe.
Ignoring the fact that the hypothetical and innovative terrorist can (1) get a sex change, (2) change his name and/or use a fake passport along with female clothing (which we have seen these kinds of characters do, and which alone seem to negate any long-term effectiveness of gender profiling), this approach might work. If we subject all males to stricter security precautions than females, we could reduce costs and save time without, potentially, reducing security. But that’s just it. The advantages seem to be in cutting costs, rather than increasing benefits. There are female Islamic militants, and the male ones could smuggle bombs or explosive devices into innocent women’s luggage in one way or another.
Conclusions
So it turns out that profiling just doesn’t work. Conservatives just love to paint liberals as pie-in-the-sky idealists with no appreciation for real threats, who play politics with security in the name of “theory” over practicality. Well, it looks like it is the conservatives who are enamored with theory to the detriment of practical logistics on this one.
We are met with two basic realities. First, with few exceptions, basically everybody is going to have to go through the security system the same. Picking out people who fit a certain “profile” might make security officials feel like they’re being smart and cunning, but, as the events of Christmas demonstrate, it just doesn’t work if the overall global security regime is garbage to begin with.
Second, we are reminded of the most important lesson of all: you don’t neutralize threats of this nature with more and more layers of security. At some point, the choice we are met with is to either shut down the entire global system of travel and commerce, or address the real, root causes that feed the animosity and hatred which leads to a transnational militant religious movement. It comes down to economic development and social and political advancement in Muslim and Arab regions, but that’s a topic for another day.
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