Sam Harris: A Response to “In Defense of Profiling”

In his recent (April 28th 2012) post, Sam Harris defends the process of “profiling” to further security in airports by saying that we should focus on certain religious groups (note: not ethnic groups) that are more likely to be terrorists than others. After all, the last few years, we’ve seen more religious terror than political such, which makes that statement somewhat sensible. There are a couple of major flaws in Harris’s reasoning, however. While he says that we should focus on certain groups, he also says that there’s no real way of determining who belong to those groups (specifically, muslims), and therein lies the problem.

Let’s focus on real profiling for a little bit. Most people in the US these days think that profiling is synonymous with racial profiling. This is wrong. What we want to happen in security is behavioral profiling, which takes race and/or religion into account not at all. Behavioral profiling is the sort of profiling that El Al does in Israel, and is the sort of profiling which is extrmely, extremely effective. Keep in mind that none of El Al’s planes have been hijacked these last 30 odd years,

El Al

despite being the target for some of the world’s most ferocious terrorist groups, both religious and political. Also keep in mind that El Al’s security screeners once (that we know of) managed to detect a sophisticated bomb in the suitcase of a white, female traveler (British) who had no idea she was carrying it in the first place. This discovery was accomplished by profiling alone, due to a few things:

1) El Al profiles everyone. Not just certain groups. That also means that no one gets to cut in line. If you want to get on one of their planes, you will be questioned and profiled.

2) El Al doesn’t profile from a profile. In their eyes, anyone is a potential terrorist, either unwittingly or with full or partial knowledge of that fact. Again, everyone is profiled.

3) El Al’s security screeners are some of the most highly trained airport security officers in the world. They are extremely good at what they do, and they are paid to match, also.

The problem with Harris’s article is that he wants to use a profile to know who to profile. He wants us to let the “obviously harmless” people through without a second glance, and focus on those people who are “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim”, no matter what race, gender or outfitting they may have or be. This just doesn’t work.

Muslim men praying

Either everyone goes, or no one gets to go – we’ve learned that one from an early age, haven’t we? It still applies here. Behavioral profiling is not about the individual person. It’s about detecting behavior and circumstances both within one individual, and in that person’s immediate circles. Using correct behavioral profiling, you can detect a terrorist that doesn’t know he/she is a terrorist, or an unknowing terrorist “mule”, if you will. That is how effective the method really is, and we should embrace that.

More trouble?

Harris writes:
“2. There is no conflict between what I have written here and “behavioral profiling” or other forms of threat detection.”

Further:
“But there are people who do not stand a chance of being jihadists, and TSA screeners can know this at a glance.”

That is wrong. There is a conflict right there. Excluding one group from scrutiny will immediately make them a prime target for terrorists. Scrutinizing everyone with behavioral profiling, El Al style, is not transferable to the US or any other country for that matter, solely because of the forbidding amount of time it takes, combined with the massive number of passengers that every airport handles every day. Israel is still small enough to make this work, but almost any other airport will encounter impossible obstacles when employing their methods.

Even our favorite (note the irony) computer-geek-turned-self-proclaimed-security-expert Bruce Schneier agrees (though he stole this quote…): “The problem with fast detection programs is that they don’t work, and the problem with the Israeli security model is that it doesn’t scale.”

Which is spot on. If profiling is going to work, we need the El Al model. That model doesn’t scale. I.e. profiling some of the people all of the time is useless, while profiling all of the people all of the time works, but you can’t profile millions of people, because that would take far too much time anywhere outside Israel.

Summarizing: Profiling works. Behavioral profiling, the way El Al does it. Sam Harris is wrong, and excluding the “obviously harmless” from scrutiny instantly makes them the prime target for terrorists. This should be obvious. The El Al method doesn’t scale, so anything outside a couple of million passengers per year is impossible for that model. We would also like to make it clear that we are fiercely pro profiling. That means we’re all for it, but it needs to be the right kind of profiling, done by qualified people, and on a scale where no one is left as a prime target audience for terrorists wanting to exploit that security hole.