Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
He didn't seem to care much for the politics of the issue. He just knows racial profiling is bad security, and was trying his best to explain that in a non-condescending way, IMO.
Maybe. I'm not going to argue about airport security with a guy who is supposed to be an expert in that field. I'm sure he knows more than I do.
But I will say that I wouldn't call what Harris was suggesting "racial profiling". It's profiling, but not based on race. I've seen Harris have the conversation before and he always uses himself as an example of a guy who would receive special scrutiny based upon several factors- age, gender, look, etc. As it is, we waste time and resources doing shit like nearly strip searching my friend's mentally-handicapped daughter in her wheelchair and scaring the fuck out of her. (That's a real life example.)
For Schneier, it seemed to be about what we can't do. We can't possibly hire and train TSA agents to be able to make these judgments. That may be true in his practical experience, but maybe the TSA needs to stop hiring dopes. El Al uses a similar system to what Harris was suggesting (among other methods) and nobody ever takes over their planes.
Finally, and in fairness to Schneier, maybe I'm wrong here, but I do think there's a possibility that he had an impression of Harris as "the anti-Muslim guy" in the same way that Affleck did and that colored the conversation from start to finish.
I just saw this response. The two quotes below, IMO, sum up Schneier's attitude regarding this whole issue. I don't understand where in the two page exchange you found Schneier to seem to have any hidden bias or agenda in regards to Harris. I don't know if he could come across any more dispassionate if he tried to.
Quote:
I've done my cost-benefit analysis of profiling based on looking Muslim, and it's seriously lopsided. On the benefit side, we have increased efficiency as screeners ignore some primary-screening anomalies for people who don't meet the profile. On the cost side, we have decreased security resulting from our imperfect profile of Muslims, decreased security resulting from our ignoring of non-Muslim terrorist threats, decreased security resulting in errors in implementing the system, increased cost due to replacing procedures with judgment, decreased efficiency (or possibly increased cost) because of the principal-agent problem, and decreased efficiency as screeners make their profiling judgments. Additionally, your system is vulnerable to mistakes in your estimation of the proper profile. If you've made any mistakes, or if the profile changes with time and you don't realize it, your system becomes even worse.
Quote:
The paper supports some of your intuitions about how useful your correlation is, but doesn't speak at all to the efficacy of building a security system around that correlation. That's what I have been trying to make explicit: just because a correlation exists doesn't mean that it is smart security to use it as a mechanism for dividing people into two categories and subjecting those categories to different levels of security.
I agree that the result is perverse. I agree that, on the face of it, it makes no sense to screen someone who looks and acts like Betty White, or those four wheelchair-using World War II veterans at San Jose Airport. But it results in better security. By "obviously wasting their time," security screeners are in fact both saving time and improving security.
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