Why profiling Muslims is a dumb idea

The bigotry that has made many Americans afraid of Muslims has been reinforced by people like Sam Harris who, because he seems smart, has led others to believe that profiling Muslims in airport security is just a matter of common sense.

To his credit, at least Harris was rational enough to allow someone else explain to him why he’s wrong and post the following on his own website, explaining why profiling makes no sense.

Bruce Schneier writes: Why do otherwise rational people think it’s a good idea to profile people at airports? Recently, neuroscientist and best-selling author Sam Harris related a story of an elderly couple being given the twice-over by the TSA, pointed out how these two were obviously not a threat, and recommended that the TSA focus on the actual threat: “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim.”

This is a bad idea. It doesn’t make us any safer—and it actually puts us all at risk.

The right way to look at security is in terms of cost-benefit trade-offs. If adding profiling to airport checkpoints allowed us to detect more threats at a lower cost, than we should implement it. If it didn’t, we’d be foolish to do so. Sometimes profiling works. Consider a sheep in a meadow, happily munching on grass. When he spies a wolf, he’s going to judge that individual wolf based on a bunch of assumptions related to the past behavior of its species. In short, that sheep is going to profile…and then run away. This makes perfect sense, and is why evolution produced sheep—and other animals—that react this way. But this sort of profiling doesn’t work with humans at airports, for several reasons.

First, in the sheep’s case the profile is accurate, in that all wolves are out to eat sheep. Maybe a particular wolf isn’t hungry at the moment, but enough wolves are hungry enough of the time to justify the occasional false alarm. However, it isn’t true that almost all Muslims are out to blow up airplanes. In fact, almost none of them are. Post 9/11, we’ve had 2 Muslim terrorists on U.S airplanes: the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber. If you assume 0.8% (that’s one estimate of the percentage of Muslim Americans) of the 630 million annual airplane fliers are Muslim and triple it to account for others who look Semitic, then the chances any profiled flier will be a Muslim terrorist is 1 in 80 million. Add the 19 9/11 terrorists—arguably a singular event—that number drops to 1 in 8 million. Either way, because the number of actual terrorists is so low, almost everyone selected by the profile will be innocent. This is called the “base rate fallacy,” and dooms any type of broad terrorist profiling, including the TSA’s behavioral profiling.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Facebooktwittermail

One thought on “Why profiling Muslims is a dumb idea

  1. Ian Arbuckle

    After all these years, and they still don’t get it, do they? It is not about terrorism, its about maintaining the fear. The necessity is to maintain a defined group as the most likely potential “them” that is threatening “us”. (They used to be Jews, then they were communists, now they are Muslims, who knows in a few years we might just decide the bad guys are the Han Chinese?) They, those different individuals are necessarily segregated as a potential threat in order to justify the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars collected in taxes from the dumb masses and expended to a relatively selective group of global corporations in mainly in America, Israel, the UK, and to a lesser extent France and a few other European countries involved in security and defense. The money is one thing but the other bonus is control of those masses by fear.

    Sure there are a few crazy people in the world, absolutely. But let’s define our terms and how to drive people crazy. It is also true that you can piss-off a great number of people some to distraction, one might think, by killing their families with drones, or destroying and occupying their countries with bombs missiles and armies, whether or not they include the odd bad apples that shoot up villages, burn Korans, kill civilians, cut off parts of body for souvenirs, pisses on them afterwards, or whatever other well documented acts of barbarity, which of course are not in any way representative of the actual unjustifiable violence, rape, occupation, domination and literal humiliation and disrespect of sovereignty handed out around the world by the US in the name of “defending American interests and spreading freedom”….

    One could imagine that this would stimulate a few individuals anyway to take up arms in the form of acts of terrorism in revenge against what they perceive as the offending hegemonic giant, but yet the fact is the only way the US authorities seem to find activists is by being them themselves, in the form of “double agents” using encouragement, offering to provide means and ways and thereby developing scenarios of entrapment. Each on is then trumpeted as a triumph in the war against a constant and prevailing threat.

    How long do we have to go on being subjected to the main stream corporately owned media and irrational quasi debates such as this one before we apply any part of the higher brain and rationally conclude who the real enemy is?

Comments are closed.