The drumbeat for racial profiling grows louder in New York City (thanks, DesiDancer):
Two elected New York City officials say Arabs should be targeted for searches on city subways. They claim the NYPD has been wasting time with random checks in its effort to prevent terrorism in the transit system… The New York Police Department said in a statement that racial profiling is illegal, of doubtful effectiveness and against department policy. [Link]
… they are most likely to be young Muslim men. Unfortunately, however, this demographic group won’t be profiled. Instead, the authorities will be stopping Girl Scouts and grannies… commuters need to be most aware of young men praying to Allah and smelling like flower water. [Link]
Even Tunku Varadarajan of the WSJ came out for profiling desis:
I find that I am—for the first time in my life—part of a “group” that is under broad but emphatic visual suspicion. In other words, I fit a visual “profile,” and the fit is most disconcerting… one must be satisfied either that profiling ought to be done or at least… that it isn’t something that “ought not to be done…” The practice cannot be rejected with the old moral clarity. The profiling process is not precisely racial but broadly physical according to “Muslim type…” [Link]
I’m pretty sure the 7/7 bombers did not leave the house all gulab attar-fabulous. It’s a practice more Arab than Pakistani, and the smell would have drawn too much attention. Racial profiling, the knee-jerk reaction to terrorist attacks on public transit, is a fool’s game. Instead of detecting inaccurate signatures (black, Arab, South Asian), the goal must be to detect behavior (carrying a bomb). The goal is accuracy. Otherwise you let deadly attacks succeed while wasting massive amounts of resources searching ordinary people.
The arms race between black hat and white hat has deep analogues in the military, the human immune system, antivirus tools, firewalls, spam filters and so on. In realm of computer security, behavior detection has utterly buried signature detection in terms of effectiveness. Signatures are trivial to spoof once you know what’s being looked for. Most viruses, worms and spam now mutate with every attack, it’s designed in from the beginning.
On 7/7, Al Qaeda switched from using Arabs to using Pakistanis and a Caribbean. Not two weeks later, they switched to using Africans. The pool of Muslim phenotypes is enormous; they can tap Chechens, Uzbeks, Filipinos, Indonesians, Chinese, Malays, white converts, black Americans, red-haired Kashmiris, blue-eyed Afghans. This is why the NYC mayor says the NYPD will use a true random sample instead of racial profiling. It’s not out of liberal fuzzy-mindedness, it’s because they’re being hard-nosed about saving lives. A race-based approach fails completely. It’s suicidal to rely on it.
Keep in mind that this discussion is about filtering out a tiny number of threats from a vast population. The NYPD, like any police force, should and does stop people with obvious indicators like wires, ticking or a chemical smell. That’s neither in dispute nor the point of this post.
From the standpoint of political conservatives, there are extremely good reasons to use the behavior approach rather than profiling. You can’t consistently be against affirmative action without also being against racial profiling. Just as race-based affirmative action is an inaccurate signature, sweeping up wealthy minorities as well as those who are genuinely poor, race-based threat detection is inaccurate as well. Above all, the burden is to be accurate — not to be politically correct, but to save lives.
Profiling also leads to big government abuses by expanding the number of law enforcement interactions with innocent citizens. Every discretionary interaction opens up the opportunity for abuse, harassment and bribery by humans with very human prejudices and flaws. Every interaction allows someone in a position of power to hassle you for arbitrary reasons. As with the computerization of government elsewhere, the point of automation is to eliminate human discretion and increase the accuracy of execution.
Exactly when countries like India and China are eliminating their red tape, profiling advocates would have NYC start up a new profiling raj. I already get pulled aside on flights all the time, which is not just a waste of my time, it’s a waste of law enforcement time. Furthermore, singling out an ethnicity for suspicion always increases the incidence of racist attacks in the world outside the subway. Right now we’ve got Sikh guys in turbans getting beaten up, when Muslim suicide bombers in the West don’t even wear turbans. It’s utter idiocy.
Those clamoring loudest for profiling are not those who will be affected by it. Their solution is not a system (‘Would this work for the entire population?’), it’s a hack, a band-aid. And those who are desi and ask to be profiled are like the soccer moms who step up to cops in the subway and demand to be searched because it make them feel better: they’re a public nuisance, and they get in the way of solving the problem. I say let them be taken aside for search — but only them 
The heart of the terrorism problem is the ever-familiar technology cycle: high tech becomes low tech over time, specialized becomes commoditized. Making time bombs used to be a skill reserved for the criminal elite. Now a single bomb maker, along with religious brainwashers, can convert petty criminals and teens still in their peach fuzz days into effective suicide bombers. And then there are cleanskins not on any watch list: the 7/7 bombers, the Columbine teens, the Terry McVeighs. Humankind will always have random idiots. What’s changed is that the random idiots are now much more lethal. Bombs have become turnkey, McTerrorism has been franchised.
“We are seeing a terrorist threat that keeps changing,” said Pierre de Bousquet, the director of France’s domestic intelligence service, known as the D.S.T., in an interview in Paris. “Often the groups are not homogeneous, but a variety of blends… Hard-core Islamists are mixing with petty criminals,” he added. “People of different backgrounds and nationalities are working together. Some are European-born or have dual nationalities that make it easier for them to travel. The networks are much less structured than we used to believe. Maybe it’s the mosque that brings them together, maybe it’s prison, maybe it’s the neighborhood. And that makes it much more difficult to identify them and uproot them.” [Link]
One very helpful aspect of the problem is that bombers focus on enclosed spaces because of physics: the power of a blast decreases with the square of the distance from its source. In other words, any blast dissipates rapidly — physics are your friend. Bombers seek out enclosed spaces to amplify the blast and to generate sources of shrapnel. In addition, the spread between any shrapnel packed in the bomb increases rapidly with the distance from the source, reducing the the chance of anyone being struck.
To fix the problem, you must harness that same, powerful technology cycle to beat it. Investing in scanners is the only way up the learning curve: it’s bombs now, but later it’ll be chemical weapons and suitcase nukes. You need to start into that cycle to even have a prayer of keeping up. Right now there’s been an improvement in the price/performance ratio of weapons with no corresponding improvement in detectors. And that’s mainly due to our misplaced priorities.
The first lesson of technology design is to limit the problem domain. The reason your inkjet costs only fifty bucks is that it doesn’t have to print in free space, it only has to put ink in a space 8œ inches wide. Similarly, the subway is an enclosed space because it reduces costs: you only have to move people on tracks a few feet wide, you only have to air-condition a limited volume of air. Since the NYC subway system already has enclosed entrances to ensure payment, all you have to do is put explosive detectors at those points.
You also must automate the process just to scale. Cities will become ever-denser, subways will move ever-increasing numbers of people, and keeping up with that growth would require an army of expensive, inaccurate human screeners.
Explosive sniffers are already in wide use at airports. Millimeter wave body scanners let you see through clothing to detect bombs. These solutions are expensive right now, but like every other mass market product in the tech cycle, they’ll become cheap over time. You seed competition by buying from multiple manufacturers. The companies get the funding and the volume to manufacture them inexpensively, and pretty soon they’re as much of a commodity as the bombs against which they defend.
The point of technological solutions is accuracy and permanence. History is replete with problems which once dominated the yammering editorial pages, becoming non-issues due to an advance in the underlying technology. In the age of Kevlar, nobody lies awake at night worrying about arrows.
Tube passengers are to have their bodies scanned by machines that see through clothing in an attempt to prevent further terrorist attacks. The millimetre wave imagers will be used to carry out random checks as people enter stations after services resume today… The technology is already used to catch illegal immigrants who hide in lorries at Channel ports…
The scanners can spot the waistcoat bombs usually worn by suicide bombers and automatically send an alert to nearby officers. Unlike other scanners, they can cover crowded entrances without the need for people to be stopped for individual checks… the advantage of millimetre wave was its ability to scan large numbers of people simultaneously and produce an instant moving image…
The system works by measuring the solar radiation reflected by people’s bodies and measuring anything which interferes with the reflection. It can be linked to closed-circuit television cameras that will automatically pick out and follow a suspect until he can be stopped and questioned… the scanners could be fitted to all 270 Underground stations within 18 months. [Link]
Bag searches are ok for a couple of weeks, but without automated scanning they’re a strike against the heart of New York City’s greatness: not food, the arts or the opposite sex, but what underlies it all, speed. If you’ve spent any time in New York, you’ll notice that it’s friendly but highly efficient. People on the street will give you exactly the directions you need, no more and no less. The deli chefs making your sandwiches take pride in being as fast as industrial robots. You could lose a finger just watching them make a bagel. The subway train doors stay open only 7-8 seconds at peak hours. If you miss the train, you know another one’s coming just a couple of minutes later.
Preserve what makes New York City great. Instead of wasting millions of dollars every week on bag search overtime, NYC should invest heavily in automated scanners and push their creators for faster, cheaper and more accurate versions. Every costly week of bag checks is another few scanners foregone and a step away from solving the problem.
