Since 9-11, there’s been heated debate about how we can or should be screening airline passengers as potential threats.
A number of folks have argued, intuitively, that developing profiling systems make the most sense. For example, if you assert that the majority of terrorists are fair-skinned, blond, blue-eyed women, ages 60-70, from countries beginning with “A”, then you increase your screening and scrutiny of such people. Picking on tall black men from Zambia would be a meaningless waste of time, annoying those men and potentially missing dangerous terrorists.
Civil libertarians have argued that profiling of this sort is intrinsically wrong, since it presupposes guilt, picking on people not because of what they’ve actually done but because of a stereotype of what they might do.
This paper posits that the civil libertarians might be correct, not so much because of their reasoning but because profiling processes (such as the FAA’s CAPS system) are relatively easy for a terrorist organization (versus individual) to defeat.
Basically, even if you hide what criteria (age, appearance, origin, behavior) you are going to use to evaluate passengers for further security checks, it’s a trivial matter for terrorist organizations to simply test the system to see who gets checked more thoroughly (pulled out for further searches and questioning) and who doesn’t. They then know what criteria to avoid in who they send to launch an actual attack.
There are signs that the 9-11 attackers used at least a degree of this technique.
Interesting — and scary — stuff.
(Via BoingBoing)