Some people are looking to Israel for ideas on how we can have good airport security without the need for scans and pat-downs. But would Israel's profiling techniques ever be acceptable in a country like ours? Especially in the view of progressives? I don't think so.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/15/60II/main324476.shtmlWhat do the Israelis do that the Americans don’t do? Well, they’ve had sky marshals since the 1960s. And racial profiling.
SNIP
Merav Rosen is a supervisor. She’s 28 and has worked at Ben Gurion seven years.
What is she looking for?
"Anything out of the ordinary, anything that does not fit," she says. "People that ask too many questions, people who seem to be lying, to be hiding something from us. We look for the extraordinary, what is not normal, what we don’t know as normal."
http://www.businessinsider.com/sorry-the-el-al-israeli-security-model-will-never-work-here-2010-1The Israeli security model is (as noted in the article) more about the passenger than their baggage. This approach is both effective, time-consuming, and "racist": the profilers have a conversation with each passenger; as I'm an Israeli Jew, I always get the abbreviated treatment -- focusing more on where my bags have been since I've packed them. As a foreigner, you get a much more in-depth grilling. As a Muslim? They want to know your shoe size, and then a whole 'nother screener comes over and asks you everything all over again, just to see that you keep your story straight. Like they say in the article, the conversations they have are not so much about what you say as how you say it. The screeners are taught to iterate a few levels deep into your story and see that it doesn't break down under scrutiny.
Naturally, this process supposes that A) the threat is foreign and mostly limited to one ethnic/religious group, and B) screeners have this sort of time.
In the US, racial profiling is... unpalatable, and if each passenger / family got even a perfunctory 1-minute Q&A session with a TSA security officer, the system would crash. The US is dealing with a larger threat profile, and a whole different order-of-magnitude of traffic.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11220.shtmlA 2007 report on racial profiling by Israeli carriers, published by the Arab Association for Human Rights and the Centre Against Racism, concluded: "This phenomenon is so widespread that it is hard to find any Arab citizen who travels abroad by air and who has not experienced a discriminatory security check at least once."
The two groups found that Arab and Muslim passengers typically faced long interrogations and extensive luggage searches, and were also regularly subjected to body and strip searches, had items including computers confiscated, were kept in holding areas and were escorted directly on to the plane.
The report noted that foreign countries that allowed Israel to carry out its own security checks at their airports failed to supervise them and preferred to "ignore their discriminatory nature and the human rights violations committed on their own soil."
SNIP
In December an airport official told the right-wing Jerusalem Post newspaper: "Profiling makes the biggest difference. A man with the name of Umar flying out of Tel Aviv, whether he is American or British, is going to get checked seven times."
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http://story.irishsun.com/index.php/ct/9/cid/3a8a80d6f705f8cc/id/570743/cs/1/“What we are trained is to look for the immediate threat, the Muslim guy. You can think he is a suicide bomber, he is collecting information. The crazy thing is that we are profiling people racially, ethnically, and even on religious grounds,” Johnathon Garb, a former El Al security guard told the Johannesburg TV program. “This is what we do,” he added.
Mr. Garb said the El Al airline had been a front for Shin Bet for years. “Here is a secret service operating above the law in South Africa,” Garb said. “We pull the wool over everyones’ eyes. We do exactly what we want. The local authorities do not know what we are doing.”
Two other former security guards with El Al verified the allegations. They told Carte Blanche black and Muslim people were often taken to a special annex room where they were held for questioning. They were interrogated they said not necessarily on matters relating to airport security. In some cases they were strip searched and their luggage taken apart. Clandestine searches of their possessions and laptops were also carried out.
One person targeted for special treatment was Virginia Tilley, the chief researcher at South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council which recently released a report accusing Israel of apartheid in the Palestinian territories. “The decision was she be checked in the harshest way because of her connections,” Garb told the Carte Blanche news program. He said Ms Tilley’s luggage was taken from her and documents in her possession were photo-copied and forwarded on to the Shin Bet in Israel. Ms Tilley confirmed she had been detained by El Al staff at the airport and her luggage was taken from her for inspection elsewhere.
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