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Friday, October 27, 2006

Reduce, reuse, recycle

In addition to writing to Salon, I was looking over old letters I had written them on other subjects. In the Asimovian spirit of recycling old writings, here's one I kind of like from June 16, on the subject of terrorist profiling. The piece that inspired it is here.

——

The reason profiling makes sense conceptually is that we have scarce resources. The logic behind profiling is no different from that behind medical triage, or the conclusion that disproportionate anti-terrorism resources should be allocated to airports in the first place, instead of to hotels and grade schools.

The reason profiling offends people is that it brushes up against sensitive categories like race, ethnicity and national origin—and also because we aren't all that good at profiling, so it often seems to amount to little more than ratifying common stereotypes. Profiling is vulnerable to an additional problem of deploying scarce resources against an intelligent enemy: the enemy will actively try to thwart whatever it is you are doing. So if you search everyone on the profiling A-list, the enemy will start looking for willing 90-year-olds.

Screeners at airport X-ray machines focus more on cylindrical metallic objects than on things that look like socks. Are they hostile toward cylindrical metal objects? No, we recognize this as a meaningless question. Might something that looks like socks still be a dangerous terror device? Yes, but we worry less. We don't have a problem with the logic of profiling. We have a problem with the details of how it is applied to people.

Simplistic profiling doesn't work well, but it would be ludicrous to abandon attempts to focus our efforts where, statistically, they will do the most good. What is the alternative?


posted at 12:50 AM

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