Do Profile; Don't Tell

In the wake of last week's foiled terrorist plot to blow up 10 U.S. jetliners flying between Britain and the United States, sensible people are reconsidering our government's stubborn opposition to profiling.

Among the sensible elsewhere are officials of the British Department for Transport, who are proposing ethnic profiling as a means of more effectively identifying potential terrorists. The predictable chorus of opposition has chimed in on cue.

The Muslim Council of Britain has warned the government to think ``very carefully,'' saying that including ``behavioral pattern recognition'' in passenger profiling would lead to discrimination. A spokesman for the council said, ``Before some kind of religious profiling is introduced, a case has to be made.'' Challenge accepted.

Most terrorist acts of the past several decades have been perpetrated by Muslim men between the ages of 17 and 40. A complete list would fill this space, but following is a partial Islamic terrorist resume:

Eleven Israeli athletes murdered at the Munich Olympics (1972); U.S. Marine barracks blown up in Beirut (1983), Achille Lauro cruise ship hijacked and elderly, disabled American passenger killed (1985); TWA Flight 847 hijacked (1985); Pan Am Flight 103 bombed (1988); World Trade Center bombed (1993); U.S. embassies bombed in Kenya and Tanzania (1998); USS Cole bombed (2000); Sept. 11, 2001; Madrid and London train bombings (2004 and 2005).

Yet we are torn. Profiling seems both un-American and dangerous in an era of slippery slopes. The paranoid leap is that detention camps are just around the bend. Thus, instead of deciding to closely scrutinize airline passengers who fit the description of a likely perpetrator -- based not on bigotry, but on evidence, history and common sense -- we frisk the elderly and confiscate toddlers' sippy cups.

Critics of profiling insist that focusing on one group will distract us from other possible terrorists -- presumably all those Baptist grandmothers recently converted to Islam. They also invariably point to Timothy McVeigh, our own homegrown terrorist who blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City. As if one white-bred misfit -- or the occasional Caucasian Muslim -- cancels out 35 years of Middle Eastern terrorists invoking Muhammad.

For a nation that laments its lapse in dot-connecting before 9/11, we are curiously blind when it comes to dealing honestly with certain people of a certain sort. Profiling isn't aimed at demonizing Muslims; it's aimed at saving lives, including Muslims.

We learned from investigators of the foiled London-based plot that Muslims played a key role in busting the conspirators, for which the world is grateful. But the idea that profiling young males of Asian or Middle Eastern descent now would alienate those who heretofore had been helpful, as some have argued, presumes that Muslims have no interest in self-preservation.

Or that they're all so belligerently ethnocentric that they'll cease cooperating if airport security officials suddenly start behaving competently.

Identifying potential terrorists is complicated by their sheer numbers in places like Britain, where between 16,000 and 18,000 Muslims are suspected to be Islamic extremists, according to Britain's MI5 counterterrorism unit. How do you track 15,000 people? You don't.

But we can focus energies and resources where plausible, including at airports where profilers are invited to be polite and discreet. And we can listen to sensible Muslims like Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, general manager of the al-Arabiya news channel, who wrote in the Arab News two years ago what our own officials struggle to say:

``It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims. ... We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women.''

And the West cannot survive if we continue to avert our eyes from the obvious. On the legal questions, profiling has at least one notable defender -- John Banzhaf, the George Washington University public interest law professor best known for taking on tobacco and fast food.

Banzhaf argues that racial profiling is constitutional if done in accordance with U.S. Supreme Court guidelines that ethnicity not be the sole criteria. Other considerations for potential hijackers might be age, gender, behavior or clothing. He also notes that courts have upheld using race/ethnicity to further ``compelling state interest," as in considering race for college admissions.

``Obviously, the government's interest in protecting the lives of thousands of citizens from a major terrorist attack is at least as 'compelling' as a better college education," he says.

For the past several years, Banzhaf has been a pain in the neck to the tobacco and fast food industries. Let's hope he proves equally troublesome to the terrorists among us.

First off - we all "profile", profiling is simply discrimination. Discrimination between good and bad risks, between good and bad neighborhoods, between good and bad investments, etc. etc. etc. Somewhere in the discussion - control of the nomenclature was lost when those absurd leftists choose very deliberately to use the term "Racial Profiling". Thus...

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 is 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. Then conventional law enforcement and investigational techniques can be applied to this highly suspect sub-population.

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.

Similarly - if we were to listen to those who complain about the hypothetical 80 year old white grandmother (in a wheelchair, no doubt) being scrutinized do not realize that al Qaeda and Hezbollah and the other terrorist organizations are directed by some folks who, despite being derange, are quite intelligent. If they knew that there was a rule excluding 80 year old white grandmothers in wheelchairs from scrutiny - they would immediately work on recruiting one (wittingly or unwittingly).

Any screening system has to be a series of screens. Algorithms which target risk, combined with random assignment (there goes grandma), as well as behavioral and judgmental screens can e combined to create a system which minimizes risk.

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