The United States is of course the opposite of all these things. If you were going to use profiling than what profiling would you use. If you focused on Arab individuals would you miss the blue eyed blond haired German convert to Islam. What about that Veteran who’s been reading the Turner Diary.

Though the eco-terror threat has yet to claim in lives in the US plane travel would be an ideal target. International air travel releases a lot of CO’2. But that doesn’t even count the other people who may be out to get us. Remember the Serbs, yeah they’re still pretty angry at us. Do you know what a Serb looks like.

And what about the drug cartels. Homeland security has only a so many people. Why not hire a few junkies tell they are mules and have them carry unbeknown to them bombs. Blow a few planes out of the sky and see which holes open up for smuggling.

We aren’t Israel. We got a lot more airports, a lot more diverse terrorist threats, and an economy that is much more dependent on airline travel.

Again, you could strip search every person who fits a profile, and it wouldn’t help if they use someone else to smuggle devices through security.

Now behavioral profiling is something that should be looked at. It’s not whether someone is dark skinned, but rather how they are acting. (And, yes, things like buying a one way ticket for cash fall into that category). There is training available for spotting certain kinds of actions that can indicate someone with possibly nefarious intent. Since even Islamic terrorists can be white, black, brown, or Asian, profiling based on looks or even name just isn’t going to work. Actions (facial expressions, body language, etc) are what you should be looking for.

In the case of Israel, what you predicted has not come to pass.

Israeli officials have told the U.S. that even after all these years, profiling remains their most important weapon against terrorism.

It is harder to “retrieve them on the far side of security” these days. Luggage is watched and scanned constantly from the moment you take it to the airport, to the time it gets on the plane. A terrorist attack that requires the terrorists to take materials out of TWO different pieces of luggage and assemble it would be unlikely to succeed these days.

al-Qaeda’s main tactic continues to be suicide-bombing, in which the bomber smuggles the weapons on board with him. These terrorists are capitalizing on the West’s refusal to do full-body scans or pat-downs due to privacy concerns. Further, they know that the West will never do cavity searches of passengers.

That Russian jetliner that exploded was thought to have been brought down by Chechnyan female terrorists who had actually secreted the explosives in their bras. They knew that security guards weren’t going to feel their breasts–so they made the most of it.

For years, Columbian drug lords have been sending their products into this country by secretly planting them in someone else’s luggage. After all, if you are looking for drugs, would you spend a lot of time looking through the luggage of a sweet, grey haired 87 yr old grandma? No wonder there’s no shortage of drugs in this country.

If I were a terrorist, that’s exactly how I would get my devices through security. Once profiling becomes wide-spread, you can do a rectal search of every person whose skin isn’t lily white and terrorists would still be able to get their weapons through by copying the tactics of the drug lords. They could put powder “A” in the carry-on bag of Granny, and liquid “B” in the carry-on bag of that professional looking 45-yr old blonde male bank executive. Then retrieve them on the far side of security and take them on the plane.

It’s not just civil rights concerns that argue against racial profiling. It’s also that the bad guys are more sophisticated than that.

Strict new security rules were just implemented at all British airports.

What’s interesting about these rules, is that these foreign airports are employing their most stringent security rules on passengers flying to America.

It looks like a two-tier security system is evolving.

It seems to me that the obvious security “holes” were plugged already during the late 1980s and it is now extremely difficult to hijack or bomb a U.S. airliner. The failed suicide bomb plots of 2001, 2006 and 2009 will realistically raise the bar even higher.

Ethnic profiling at the airport seems less useful as it would not detect terrorists such as Richard Reid. Covert profiling by anti-terrorism agencies seems much more promising, e.g. the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot was foiled before the suspects made it to the airport.

MARCU$

Our security policies operate on the principle of egalitarian terrorism–that it’s equally likely that a Muslim from Yemen with light luggage who pays cash for his flight, an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn whose ticket was paid by his Yeshiva, a blonde lesbian from San Francisco, and a Hispanic mom with two young children from Texas are all equally likely to commit suicide-bombing.

You don’t need to have a degree in mathematical statistics to laugh at this. We don’t do it because it makes technical sense. We do it out of some fealty to equal opportunity or something. And because if we start doing it, the usual civil libertarian types will run down their database of sympathetic judges and go scurrying off to one such judge to issue an injunction to stop it.