I just read an article entitled Terror in the Skies, Again? and nearly had to go change my shorts. What a horrifically frightening experience to have to sit there for four hours and watch people work to blow up your plane. I mean, those seats are uncomfortable enough without having a terrorist bumping your elbow every time he goes to the can to assemble his bomb.
The heartbreaker, of course, is that we have a highly effective tool for identifying terrorists. Simply allow law enforcement officials to use demographic information to target suspects. This profiling technique is one of the most basic and robust functions of the human brain. We are built to categorize data — it is the primary way in which we organize memory. People form categories out of prototypical features and compare a new instance for inclusion in the category with the feature set. For example, if I show you a puffin you might be unsure if it is a bird, because most birds fly.
The hard part about profiling is that one ends up treating all members of a particular demographic as suspects, based on the behavior of a subset of people in the demographic. Take serial killers for example. Most serial killers are single white men. Does that mean all single white men are serial killers? Obviously not. However, if a law enforcement official needed to locate a serial killer in a random sampling of people, he should focus on single white men because he will have a statistically greater chance of finding the perpetrator. Similarly, if you want to find a person who commits violent crime you should be looking for a young black male. This technique is remarkably effective; the insurance industry banks on it.
Now as far as we know, most purveyors of terror in the United States are young men of Middle Easter descent. So if you are doing a security screening at an airport and you come across a young man, of middle eastern descent, with a one-way ticket, carrying a violin case DO YOU FREAKIN’ THINK HE MIGHT BE A TERRIORIST!!
Update: Turns out they might not have been freakin’ terrorists; instead they may have been actual musicians headed to a gig (2nd story). The problem with profiling is that you will always have a high degree of false positives, because usually the majority of the people in a demographic aren’t guilty of the crime. But this story indicates that this behavior in the plane is an ongoing tactic. Profiling still needs to happen to increase the chances of finding Mr. Terrorist.