Quote:
Originally Posted by MrWookie
You're right, of course. There are no downsides to profiling. I mean, it's not like the Muslims could ever find a white female who'd get through security unchecked to do their dirty work. Not a chance.
It seems that there is a serious misunderstanding re what effective profiling actually entails. Effective profiling should vastly increase the chances of stopping any person that poses a threat, no matter their race, gender, age, etc... It is therefore obviously not simply a matter of spotting dark skinned arabic looking males in check in lines and searching them, etc...
To be effective, every single passenger is profiled by a number of different highly trained security staff at different stages of the process - usually nothing more than a few questions which takes no more time than the average check in and often much less (in Israel, every passenger is "profiled" at least 3 times before he even steps inside the airport building and for 95% of passengers, this takes no more than a minute or two). Obviously some passengers are singled out for further questions/checks.
It is the training of the staff and the infrastructure available to them that makes profiling effective. The classic example that is relevant to your point is that of the 32 year old Irish woman, six months pregnant, who had no idea she was carrying a bomb onto an El Al flight from London (planted by her Jordanian "boyfriend" and assisted by Syrian embassy staff).
The problem (excluding cultural and legal issues) is that US airports are on average about 8 times as big as Ben Gurion Airport in terms of numbers of passengers and the use of Israeli methods is simply impossible in practice due to the costs. This does not mean that the techniques are not effective however.