Rishon Rishon

Profiles of Profiling

I just read a frightening story (via Civilization Calls). It would have made excellent fiction, but as far as I can tell, it was true.

As we sat waiting for the plane to finish boarding, we noticed another large group of Middle Eastern men boarding. The first man wore a dark suit and sunglasses. He sat in first class in seat 1A, the seat second-closet to the cockpit door. The other seven men walked into the coach cabin. As aware Americans, my husband and I exchanged glances, and then continued to get comfortable. I noticed some of the other passengers paying attention to the situation as well. As boarding continued, we watched as, one by one, most of the Middle Eastern men made eye contact with each other. They continued to look at each other and nod, as if they were all in agreement about something. I could tell that my husband was beginning to feel anxious.

The take-off was uneventful. But once we were in the air and the seatbelt sign was turned off, the unusual activity began. The man in the yellow T-shirt got out of his seat and went to the lavatory at the front of coach -- taking his full McDonald's bag with him. When he came out of the lavatory he still had the McDonald's bag, but it was now almost empty. He walked down the aisle to the back of the plane, still holding the bag. When he passed two of the men sitting mid-cabin, he gave a thumbs-up sign. When he returned to his seat, he no longer had the McDonald's bag.

Then another man from the group stood up and took something from his carry-on in the overhead bin. It was about a foot long and was rolled in cloth. He headed toward the back of the cabin with the object. Five minutes later, several more of the Middle Eastern men began using the forward lavatory consecutively. In the back, several of the men stood up and used the back lavatory consecutively as well.

As a Middle Easterner myself, I was taken aback at the security measures in the US the first time I visited after 9/11 – about nine months later. I was traveling with my wife and children, what I would expect to be a particularly unlikely profile for a terrorist. Nevertheless, we were subjected to thorough searches every time we boarded a plane – quite a few times, since we made 5 trips within the US. Let me make it clear, though I did find the searches annoying, I don’t consider them to be a violation of my civil rights. The humorous part was that every time we were told we had been randomly selected for extra security procedures. With such luck maybe I should be playing the lottery!

The not-so-humorous part was the incompetence of the checks. I suppose the good part was the national (not ethnic!) profiling – our tickets were bought in Israel, but I should hope that Saudi Arabians and Egyptians were subjected to similar treatment. The scary part was that they relied solely on brute-force searches, not using too much brute-force either. The people doing the searches were clearly minimally trained, and following a script.

In contrast Israelis, who have successfully kept terrorists out of their planes for decades, rely primarily on psychological profiling. They interview everyone who boards a plane. The specific answers to their questions are less important than how the questions are answered. Human beings have a sixth sense for suspicious behavior – a sense, which like other senses, can be trained. Unfortunately, it is a process that relies on ad-hoc behavior is not amenable to fixed procedures. They look for two types of people: terrorists (of course) and dupes. My impression is that a lot more innocent people look like dupes than like terrorists, but it is a real threat, as was shown in the Hindawi case, where a terrorist sent his pregnant girlfriend on a plane with a suitcase concealing a bomb. (The girlfriend was quite upset when she found out about it.)

I have frequently traveled in and out of Israel, and frequently gone through the procedures. I had my suitcase searched only once, when I was young and innocent. (It was a much more pleasant experience than the US experience, since the Israelis have you open and unpack your own suitcase, while they watch.) It suggests that with a little intelligence the following is unnecessary, but can Americans do it?

No one checked the folds in my newspaper or the contents of my son's backpack... or what we carried on board a 757 jet liner bound for American's largest metropolis.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn comments. How much training should you need to be suspicious of this behavior:

On August 1st, James Woods, the motion picture actor, was flying from Boston to Los Angeles. With him in the first class cabin were half-a-dozen guys, four of whom were young Middle Eastern men. Woods, like all really good actors, is a keen observer of people, and what he observed as they flew west persuaded him they were hijackers. The FBI has requested that he not reveal all the details, but he says he asked the flight attendant if he could speak to the pilot. After landing at LAX, the crew reported the incident to the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA did …nothing. Two of the four were on board the September 11th planes. Woods turned out to be sitting in on a rehearsal for the big day.

After 9/11, the standard line was that Osama bin Laden had pulled off an ingenious plan. But he didn’t have to be ingenious, just lucky. And he was luckiest of all in that the obviousness of what was happening paradoxically made investigating it all the more problematic. His agents aren’t that smart – not in the sense of IRA smart, or Carlos the Jackal smart. The details Woods is permitted to discuss are in themselves very revealing: The four men boarded with no hand luggage. Not a thing. That’s what he noticed first. Everyone going on a long flight across a continent takes something: a briefcase, a laptop, a shopping bag with a couple of airport novels, a Wall Street Journal or a Boston Herald.

But these boys had zip. They didn’t use their personal headsets, they declined all food and drink, they did nothing but stare ahead to the cockpit and engage in low murmurs in Arabic. They behaved like conspirators. And Woods was struck by the way they treated the stewardess: “They literally ignored her like she didn't exist, which is sort of a kind of Taleban, you know, idea of womanhood, as you know, not even a human being.”

UPDATE: Amritas comments.

Posted by David Boxenhorn at July 19, 2004 02:35 PM