Thread: Two men kept from boarding US plane after speaking Arabic

How would the dogs know what a terrorist looks like?
Are the dogs trained to understand the Arabic language?
My word, how dog training has advanced recently!

Since this thread is in danger of being despatched to the doghouse, here's an article that caught my eye in last week's Economist (pay attention Looper);

The Economist
Aviation security
No more of the same, please
A lot of what passes for security at airports is more theatrical than real
Nov 14th 2015 | From the print edition

THE growing certainty that the mid-air destruction of a Metrojet airliner flying from Sharm el-Sheikh to St Petersburg was caused by a bomb placed in the baggage hold has led to predictable calls from politicians for tighter airport security across much of the world. “What we have got to do is ensure that airport security everywhere is at the level of the best,” said Philip Hammond, Britain’s foreign secretary. “That may mean additional costs; it may mean additional delays at airports as people check in.” The deaths of 224 people aboard the Airbus A321 is a tragedy. But if passengers groan at ever more intrusive security screening, they are right.

Airliners are exceedingly tempting targets for jihadist terrorists, particularly those wanting to attack the “far enemy” in the West. Inspired by its success on September 11th 2001, al-Qaeda and its offshoots have sought several times since to strike at aircraft. In 2006 an ambitious plot to bring down several planes crossing the Atlantic simultaneously was foiled by good intelligence work. In 2010 a tip-off from a Saudi agent working for the British helped uncover an attempt by al-Qaeda’s Yemeni branch to send bombs disguised as printer toner cartridges to Chicago. Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underpants bomber”, tried to set off explosives on board airliners before being subdued by their fellow passengers.

Two things are striking about these events. The first is that, despite the terrorists’ fascination with blowing up airliners, attempts to do so are actually rather rare. Unless the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that disappeared last year was brought down by terrorists (the most probable theory remains pilot suicide) the explosion of the Metrojet A321 over Sinai is the first major success they have had against an airline since 2004, when two Russian planes were blown up. The second striking thing is that the enhanced airport security introduced after the terrorist attacks of 2001 played no role in thwarting any of these attacks.

Hamming it up

Officials responsible for airport security argue that the system of checks and screening that take place at every airport, albeit with varying degrees of rigour, are the main reason for the absence of successful attacks. Perhaps they have served as a modest deterrent. But there are legitimate doubts about how much the kind of security currently inflicted on passengers really contributes to their safety.

The prohibition on carrying liquids on board, introduced in response to the method of mixing chemicals to explosive effect revealed by the 2006 plot, is a case in point. If security staff find illicit liquids that a passenger has not presented, they deliver a ticking off and confiscate the containers, but still allow the passenger to fly. Discovery of a gun or bomb, by contrast, would result in immediate arrest and almost certain punishment. Despite the mild consequences, it appears that nobody has been apprehended trying to get liquids on board to combine into a bomb in almost a decade. Nor have there been any reports of a would-be shoe bomber being intercepted despite the requirement for passengers to remove their shoes, brought in after Mr Reid’s cack-handed effort.

It could be that both security measures are so effective that they have completely deterred would-be terrorists from trying these methods again. Or it could be that they are essentially a performance to reassure passengers. Most experts incline towards the latter view. Philip Baum, a security consultant and editor of Aviation Security International, calls it “security theatre as opposed to security reality”.

America’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has a budget of more than $7 billion a year; it also has access to the most advanced scanning technologies money can buy. Critics say it has not foiled a single terrorist plot or caught a single terrorist in the past decade.

Bruce Schneier, the chief technology officer of Resilient Systems, a security firm, points out that whereas the TSA catches plenty of guns and knives inadvertently packed by passengers, it is less good at spotting more determined attempts to get bad stuff onto aircraft. In June its acting head was “reassigned” after a so-called “red team” appointed by the inspector-general of DHS succeeded in getting fake bombs and weapons through the screening process in 67 out of 70 tests carried out in airports across America.

Why such a dismal record? “My guess is that it’s a combination of things,” reckons Mr Schneier. “Security screening is an incredibly boring job, and almost all alerts are false alarms. It’s very hard for people to remain vigilant in this sort of situation, and sloppiness is inevitable.” Mr Schneier also points to technology failures. Screening technologies are poor at detecting PETN, an ingredient of the explosive Semtex, carried by the underpants bomber. A disassembled weapon has an excellent chance of getting through airport security. Mr Schneier reckons that the only worthwhile security changes that happened after the 2001 terrorist attacks were the introduction of locked, blast-proof cockpit doors (the al-Qaeda terrorists used knives to take over the planes) and the willingness of passengers to intervene if they see somebody behaving oddly.

Some security experts argue that one of the greatest vulnerabilities at airports comes from what Mr Baum calls “the insider threat”. The working assumption is that the Metrojet bomb was placed in the hold by a baggage handler or by someone who had airside access (another possibility is that the bomb was placed in a passenger’s luggage by a hotel worker and was not picked up by airport scanners). It was probably detonated by a barometric trigger device when the plane gained altitude.

Mr Baum reckons that the airport at Sharm el-Sheikh is no worse than many others at vetting staff. He says that at British airports there are many people working airside who follow jihadist social media and that at some big American airports employees are not screened on their way into work if they have an ID card. Nobody is more dangerous than a psychologically disturbed pilot, as Andreas Lubitz demonstrated when he killed 150 people by flying his Germanwings Airbus A320 into a mountain earlier this year.

Some clue as to how easy it would be to put a bomb into somebody else’s bag comes from the number of valuables stolen from checked-in luggage. In the four years to 2014 passengers filed over 30,000 reports of missing property with the TSA. This year police at Miami International Airport used a hidden camera to film baggage handlers rifling through bags in a plane’s hold and stealing whatever took their fancy. Security experts reckon such practices are widespread.

The main reason why airport security is so bad, says Mr Baum, is that it tries to find things instead of focusing on the people who might carry them. Issy Boim, a former Shin Bet officer who worked closely with Israel’s airline, El Al, argues that whereas the Americans are looking for weapons, the Israelis “are looking primarily for the terror suspect”. Mr Baum is a strong advocate of what is known as “profiling”— building a picture of both passengers and airline staff. He rejects the idea that this has to be based on crude stereotyping (being suspicious of all young Muslim men, for example). It should be based on behaviour both prior to flying—for example, when, how and where a ticket was purchased—and at the airport itself.

El Al employs people who have been trained in psychological observation techniques to interview every passenger before he or she is cleared to go through physical screening. Anyone who arouses their suspicion is subjected to a further grilling and may well not fly. El Al is thought to use some profiling techniques that would be politically unacceptable in Europe or America. Hebrew-speaking Israelis can expect to get off more lightly than Arabs and single white women, for example. But as Mr Baum points out, customs and immigration officers at airports in the West commonly use profiling, “and it works”.

El Al also spends more than other airlines on other types of security. Hold bags are subjected to barometric pressure testing, undercover armed marshals travel on every flight and its planes are even equipped with anti-missile systems.

Elsewhere, better technology might improve the performance of conventional screening, but few airports can afford to update their systems whenever the latest gizmo comes out. Instead, says Mr Baum, they should use profiling to help make their procedures much less routine. “Airport security is far too predictable,” he adds, “Giving everyone a pat-down search is a waste of resources. Terrorists don’t like unpredictability.”

Mr Schneier is more dubious about profiling, and he is “incensed” by the way the TSA singles out some of the most unlikely passengers “for humiliation, abuse and sometimes theft”. He says that when people propose profiling, “they are really asking for a system that can apply judgment. Unfortunately that’s really hard. Rules are easier to explain and train…judgment requires better-educated, more expert and higher-paid screeners.”

Simply doing more of the kind of airport security by rote that is done now seems like a bad idea. There ought to be more emphasis on dealing with insider threats through better vetting and more intrusive monitoring of airside staff by CCTV. Apart from that, greater focus on passenger behaviour at the airport and less predictable forms of screening (for example, more swab tests, more use of sniffer dogs and so on) would be good.

But the most important thing of all might be to keep a sense of proportion. Many people travel on buses and trains, go to sporting events and attend open-air concerts. All are potential targets for terrorists, yet they receive not even a fraction of the attention that air travel gets.

Note: The Economist allow the sharing of articles.

Originally Posted by Davis Knowlton

Land of the Free...Home of the Brave.

I always thought the last word was a token gesture to the true owners of the land.....

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

I thought I'd answered you by posting a picture of a non-Middle Eastern caucasian who was responsible for a terrorist bomb in the US.

The basis of your argument against racial profiling, as outlined in my scenario, seems to have body-swerved the question by moving swiftly to the tenuous idea that ME people don't look different to white people. You can cherry pick some examples to use this as your line of argument but you know as well as I do that in general it is extremely weak. ME ethnic people are on the most part recognisable in some way from their appearance. Anyway this story was based on identifying individuals through language so skin colour is not the only way to racially categorise and individual.

So to factor that out for sake of argument, if the terrorist threat came from a group that was unquestionably easily distinguishable in the west, say East Asians or Africans, would it be OK to focus attention on racially recognisable individuals during a period of high threat danger from an ethnically identifiable terror group as outlined in the scenario?

Originally Posted by Ronin

Again your statement is BS and you are doing nothing more than stereotyping. Ever heard of the IRA? Not a muslim there so are all Irish terrorists?

The British security forces certainly focussed attention of people with Irish accents during periods of high alert from an IRA attack. that is exactly the same thing that I am suggesting. Was it wrong of them to do so? I don't remember it being an issue with the British public. In the interests of social dignity should they have expended only 5% of their search efforts on Oirish accents and 95% on British accents? That one is for you too HarryBobo.

Originally Posted by Looper

The British security forces certainly focussed attention of people with Irish accents during periods of high alert from an IRA attack. that is exactly the same thing that I am suggesting. Was it wrong of them to do so? I don't remember it being an issue with the British public. In the interests of social dignity should they have expended only 5% of their search efforts on Oirish accents and 95% on British accents? That one is for you too HarryBobo.

Can you tell the difference between a Protestant Irish and Catholic Irish accent, Looper?

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

Originally Posted by Looper

The British security forces certainly focussed attention of people with Irish accents during periods of high alert from an IRA attack. that is exactly the same thing that I am suggesting. Was it wrong of them to do so? I don't remember it being an issue with the British public. In the interests of social dignity should they have expended only 5% of their search efforts on Oirish accents and 95% on British accents? That one is for you too HarryBobo.

Can you tell the difference between a Protestant Irish and Catholic Irish accent, Looper?

He can't tell the difference between his arse and his elbow.

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

Originally Posted by Looper

The British security forces certainly focussed attention of people with Irish accents during periods of high alert from an IRA attack. that is exactly the same thing that I am suggesting. Was it wrong of them to do so? I don't remember it being an issue with the British public. In the interests of social dignity should they have expended only 5% of their search efforts on Oirish accents and 95% on British accents? That one is for you too HarryBobo.

Can you tell the difference between a Protestant Irish and Catholic Irish accent, Looper?

I can, more often than not . Essential survival skill for NI in the 70s. Don't ask me how it's done but I'm pretty sure many Irish people can do the same.

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Don't ask me how it's done but I'm pretty sure many Irish people can do the same.

No doubt. Bet Loopy couldn't though.

I once sat next to a couple of Irish lads on BKK - CM flight. Young dudes out for a good time, very jovial pleasant and friendly. At least I think they were. For all I know they could've been calling me a coont the whole time.

I couldn't understand a word they were saying!

I don't know why all this hair pulling and angst over racial profiling.
It's a fact that the Majority of middle eastern people are Muslim. it's a fact that certainly at the moment and if recent events are anything to go by, if anyone is going to commit an act of terrorism it's very likely to be a Muslim. if racial profiling will make it safer for the non terrorist public, then sorry for a few people who might be inconvenienced or offended, but profile away.

Then to paraphrase a current meme: on that basis they should start profiling for white dudes going into schools, shops, movie theaters etc.

But they don't.

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

Originally Posted by Looper

The British security forces certainly focussed attention of people with Irish accents during periods of high alert from an IRA attack. that is exactly the same thing that I am suggesting. Was it wrong of them to do so? I don't remember it being an issue with the British public. In the interests of social dignity should they have expended only 5% of their search efforts on Oirish accents and 95% on British accents? That one is for you too HarryBobo.

Can you tell the difference between a Protestant Irish and Catholic Irish accent, Looper?

I can, more often than not . Essential survival skill for NI in the 70s. Don't ask me how it's done but I'm pretty sure many Irish people can do the same.

Total and complete bollox. The Shankhill area is riven with pockets of both Catholic and Protestant groups and there is no fucking way anyone could distinguish which was which from speech patterns.
Discerning social differences was mostly achieved by establishing which school one may have attended but that was a crude and often misleading method. Which street one may have occupied was the only sure way.

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

Can you tell the difference between a Protestant Irish and Catholic Irish accent, Looper?

I can easily tell the difference between Southern Irish and Northern Irish (even some regions within each, perhaps not religious background). I thought anybody could. For profiling purposes that would translate into something like Southern Irish = 98% republican sympathiser. Northern Irish = 50% I would guess.

But what is the point of this line of argument anyway? Anybody with any Irish accent would have been routinely singled out for attention during an IRA high alert, northern or southern so that is racial profiling. They would identify them for extra questioning by catholic surnames too so that is more specific ethnic profiling.

You and HarryBobo are basically saying that the only reason not to use profiling is that you claim it is difficult to guess ethnicity. But it is a lame argument for 2 reasons

1. it is bollocks as the majority of the time it is not that difficult to use appearance and/or accent and/or name to identify approximate ethnicity
2. it sidesteps the question of whether profiling should or should not be used in principle regardless of how easy identification is

Can you not answer my hypothetical scenario? It brings the issue of the principle into focus.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

He can't tell the difference between his arse and his elbow.

Hey Bobo, it is difficult for you too when you forget to insert your anal pacifier

Originally Posted by stroller

specially when more accurate profiling practices are available.

Interesting, such as what?

Anybody with any Irish accent would have been routinely singled out for attention during an IRA high alert, northern or southern so that is racial profiling.

Oh, the Irish are a race? And what distinguishes them from other races is their accent? I didn't know that.

How did profiling work out in the Birmingham Six case?

Originally Posted by Looper

But what is the point of this line of argument anyway? Anybody with any Irish accent would have been routinely singled out for attention during an IRA high alert, northern or southern so that is racial profiling. They would identify them for extra questioning by catholic surnames too so that is more specific ethnic profiling.

Did that actually happen or has an example you raised suddenly moved into the realm of 'fact!' for convenience?

Quite aside from the fact that 'Irish' is a nationality and not a race I'm not aware of people having been singled out based on their accent/surname as opposed to simply their affiliations.

Originally Posted by Looper

You and HarryBobo are basically saying that the only reason not to use profiling is that you claim it is difficult to guess ethnicity.

Utter bollocks.

Among the many logical fallacies and sophistry that you regularly employ your constant misrepresentations is the most glaring and jarring closely followed by...

Originally Posted by Looper

Can you not answer my hypothetical scenario? It brings the issue of the principle into focus.

... That. I didn't see any hypothetical scenario you posted and even if I had I wouldn't bother addressing it. Hypotheticals may be a useful rhetorical device but they're meaningless precisely because they are hypothetical.

You can dream up any hypothetical to fit with whatever specious and logically flawed thinking you're employing.

What if, for example and hypothetically speaking, you were actually a sentient gaping arsehole just dribbling shit on the forum.

At the risk of moving this further off topic, the question should not be about profiling. It should be about the cost effectiveness of homeland security. Read a good piece a couple years back. Well worth a read.

Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security

John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart

ABSTRACT: The cumulative increase in expenditures on U.S. domestic homeland security over the decade since 9/11 exceeds one trillion dollars. It is clearly time to examine these massive expenditures applying risk assessment and cost-benefit approaches that have been standard for decades. Thus far, officials do not seem to have done so and have engaged in various forms of probability neglect by focusing on worst case scenarios; adding, rather than multiplying, the probabilities; assessing relative, rather than absolute, risk; and inflating terrorist capacities and the importance of potential terrorist targets. We find that enhanced expenditures have been excessive. To be deemed cost-effective in analyses that substantially bias the consideration toward the opposite conclusion, the security measures would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect each year against 1,667 otherwise successful attacks that each inflicted some $100 million in damage (more than four per day) or 167 attacks inflicting $1 billion in damage (nearly one every two days). This is in the range of destruction of what might have happened had the Times-Square bomber of 2010 been successful. Although there are emotional and political pressures on the terrorism issue, this does not relieve politicians and bureaucrats of the fundamental responsibility of informing the public of the limited risk that terrorism presents, of seeking to expend funds wisely, and of bearing in mind opportunity costs. Moreover, political concerns may be over-wrought: restrained reaction has often proved to be entirely acceptable politically. And avoiding overreaction is by far the most cost-effective counterterrorism measure.

https://www.hsaj.org/articles/43

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

What if, for example and hypothetically speaking, you were actually a sentient gaping arsehole just dribbling shit on the forum.

Why is that hypothetical?

Originally Posted by stroller

Oh, the Irish are a race? And what distinguishes them from other races is their accent? I didn't know that.

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

Quite aside from the fact that 'Irish' is a nationality and not a race

So what? We are discussing profiling. It could be race, accent, religion, language; it is the idea of focussing security resources on a group of people based on their type. This risks offending the group but increases the chance of a result. That is the essence of the question. I think you can understand the issue but are just obfuscating because it compromises your idealised view of how the world should operate.

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

I didn't see any hypothetical scenario

Here it is again.

Originally Posted by Looper

So to take a hypothetical situation:-

There is a credible threat that on a particular day IS affiliated agents in the US are planning to bomb some kind of public gathering, lets say a public parade of some kind.

Lets say that the security force intelligence shows that 97% of IS recruits in the US are of middle eastern ethnic origin.

The bomb sniffer dogs have limited resources.

Is it OK for the dog handler boss to tell the handlers that they need to focus their attention on individuals of middle eastern appearance while searching the crowd?

Or is it better to keep our advanced moral standards upheld by not focussing resources on an ME profile but thereby knowingly increase the risk of a successful attack?

Not very far fetched or hard to understand but I am guessing you will decline to answer because it is 'sophistry' - or maybe because you can't answer it honestly without compromising your political position.

I am not even saying that there is a right answer, but I think there is a conundrum worth pondering which you seem to be denying.

Originally Posted by Looper

So what? We are discussing profiling

Oh are we now. So general profiling and not just profiling based on 'Middle-eastern' appearance or accent/sounding language (i.e. race) as you've previously been at pains to discuss in this thread.

Originally Posted by Looper

Here it is again.

And here I am, again, telling you I can't be arsed with pointless hypotheticals.

If it helps then imagine that I could be though... Hypothetically speaking.

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

So general profiling and not just profiling based on 'Middle-eastern' appearance or accent/sounding language (i.e. race) as you've previously been at pains to discuss in this thread.

Yes, precisely.

ME profiling is an example of racial profiling.

Racial profiling is an example of profiling in general.

There is a trade off between social dignity and crime prevention when profiling is employed.

The debate is where the best point lies along the trade-off scale.

I challenge any of my adversaries on this thread to give an honest answer to the simple and not unrealistic hypothetical scenario outlined above.

Originally Posted by Looper

Originally Posted by stroller

Oh, the Irish are a race? And what distinguishes them from other races is their accent? I didn't know that.

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

Quite aside from the fact that 'Irish' is a nationality and not a race

So what? ...

That:
"Anybody with any Irish accent would have been routinely singled out for attention during an IRA high alert, northern or southern so that is racial profiling."


I'd rather leave the profiling to professional profilers who know what 'racial' means, amongst other things.

Originally Posted by Looper

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

So general profiling and not just profiling based on 'Middle-eastern' appearance or accent/sounding language (i.e. race) as you've previously been at pains to discuss in this thread.

Yes, precisely.

ME profiling is an example of racial profiling.

Racial profiling is an example of profiling in general.

There is a trade off between social dignity and crime prevention when profiling is employed.

The debate is where the best point lies along the trade-off scale.

I challenge any of my adversaries on this thread to give an honest answer to the simple and not unrealistic hypothetical scenario outlined above.

FFS Looper, I just can't be bothered with yet more rote, cookie-cutter, right-wing bigot, knee-jerk reactionary, logic gymnastics and nonsense poorly disguised and presented as meritorious debate.

Honestly, up until recently, I thought you were just trolling or playing devils advocate with all this sort of nonsense, particularly in the same sex marriage thread, and doing a spectacular job of the former and a complete piss-poor one of the latter.

Seems that I was wrong and you're actually a genuine mung bean. So now I'm going to have to revise my previous opinion of you as being a worthwhile and decent poster.

I fully expect you to not give an actual flying-fuck about that but human nature being what it is nobody likes being wrong so I'm going to blame you for that and mostly just red you at every conceivable opportunity for being such a disappointing douche.