Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Human capability, judgment and perception
Israeli Yishai Ha'etzni makes a compelling case in the New York Post for profiling of airline passengers.
He cites two disturbing examples of how these techniques have helped Israel shape up effectively to a less benign terrorist threat:
(In) April 17, 1986. Anne-Marie Murphy, a pregnant Irish woman, was traveling alone to Israel to meet her fiancé's parents. Her bags went through an X-ray machine without problems, and she and her passport appeared otherwise unremarkable.
But ... (t)hey inspected her bags more closely and discovered a sheet of Semtex ... under a false bottom. Unbeknownst to Murphy, her fiancé, Nizar Hindawi, had intended to kill her and their unborn child along with the other passengers on the plane.
...In May 2002, a would-be suicide bomber ran away from the entrance to a mall in Netanya after guards at the entrance grew suspicious. Though he killed three people when he blew himself up on a nearby street, he would have murdered far many more people had he been able to enter the mall.
His ethnicity - along with his demeanor, dress, even his hair - ... was a factor.
The author argues that profiling simply "works better than anything else", that "blanket avoidance of profiling undermines the entire point of checking passengers":
Is profiling worth the resulting infringement on the democratic values of equality? Yes. After all, protecting human life is also a democratic value, perhaps the supreme one.
Terrorists use our society's openness against us.
