Styling and Profiling

Over the weekend, I revisited my copy of The End of Faith, a 2004 book from one of those “angry” New Atheists, Sam Harris. As an aside, you ever consider how almost universally the adjective angry is nowadays applied to discredit an idea or a person or a movement and paint a narrative? As if the emotion used to convey an idea somehow alters that idea’s merit. The OWS protesters are angry. The Tea Party is angry. The Angry Left. The Angry Right. Hell, frequently it is applied to people, like Harris, that aren’t angry at all, but rather simply speak forcefully. From what I can tell of his exchanges and debates on the ‘Net, the dude is about as laid back as they come. My dive back into Harris’ bestseller was triggered by two events at different ends of the spectrum;

1. The wave of yet more Islamic murderers killing in support of their “Religion of Peace” in Benghazi and throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
2. A despicable “Vote for Obama, Go to Hell” video and column from Springfield, IL Catholic Bishop John Paprocki.(Much more on this in the next few days.)

Faith, among its many topics, covers the conflict between rational thought and religion, and the ramifications of tolerance toward religious fundamentalism by religious moderates. Harris is a criticism magnet  – he attracts it from all sides. The Political Left (Harris just obliterates Islam). The Political Right (for attacks on Christianity). An equal opportunity offender.  I’ve read almost all of the criticism on Harris – trust me, that is no easy chore - there is a lot to review.  I don’t agree with every single thing he writes, but I find him interesting and easy to read. The common criticism of his writing is that it appeals only to those that already are in his choir. Guilty, Your Honor – and please that puts him in the %99 of authors and pundits – nothing unique about Harris there.

One of Harris’ more recent online dustups has been a series of controversial posts on his blog advocating special profiling of Muslims during passenger screening at US Airports. Without fail, it seems, every couple of weeks there is some incident involving some really poor judgment by a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) security screener that makes its way to Fox News, Drudge, World Net Daily, Huffington, or the DailyKos and goes viral and triggers some new OOTD (Outrage of the Day). This country can do some serious outrage, can’t it? Manufactured or Real. Hell, I am outraged over all the outrage.

Some of the incidents that I recall, off the top of my head, include:

• A child in a wheelchair getting the business from TSA. 
• A poor old guy with a colostomy bag getting the Third Degree. 
• Some screaming hysterical four-year old getting patted down.
• Some apparently attractive Dallas cutie getting subjected to multiple humiliating full-body scans from lewd TSA losers. I say “apparently” because I have not personally seen the body scans, but would be willing to offer my review services. (Your Faithful Servant would never have to worry about that humiliation – sigh).
• The Really Big Unit dude at San Francisco International Airport (warning Mature Content)  and I am not talking about Hall-of-Famer Randy Johnson nor about Spinal Tap bassist Derek Smalls.  “TSA didn’t know what to make of the massive bulge on my thigh." I am sorry, but you can’t make that stuff up.

You know the drill. Following each of these outrageous incidents there is always some major clamoring about the idiocy of the current system that is designed to screen everybody.   Before January, 2009, the criticisms were amplified by The Leftwing Echo Chamber (right to privacy, illegal search and seizure, and all that jazz). Since January, 2009, the criticisms are amplified by the Rightwing Echo Chamber (“everybody knows that we only need to worry about Muslims”). Hell, some folks have even leveraged these incidents to inadvertently stumble into a serious pay raise. Consider the case of Rent-A-Liberal Juan Williams, who had the good fortune (for him) to say in 2004:

"Look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."

Yo Juan – the 9/11 murderers didn’t wear traditional Islamic garb – they were dressed like Silicon Valley software engineers. Jesus, talk about saying stupid stuff and falling into a boatload of money. Hopefully Williams sends his brilliant ex-bosses at NPR a Christmas Card  every December for firing him. Correction: NPR, of course I mean Holiday Greeting Card) . Talk about stupid compounding stupid.

I am most definitely not a security expert but I have some basic questions about this “Let’s Just Profile the Muslims” approach. It has nothing to do with Political Correctness - offending religious folks is just about last on my list of “Things I Give a Shit About”. My concerns are more “implementation considerations”:

1. How do you tell from looking at a person what religion they believe in?
2. Why do you think our attackers would not change their approach  once we starting looking for a specific profile?
3. Why do you think we can scale the sophisticated behavioral profiling that Israel uses (with great results) across a country as large as the US with as many airports and within our budgetary constraints?

Back to Sam Harris and Muslim profiling. His original arguments were made here in "In Defense of Profiling". This prompted a response from Security Expert Bruce Schneier  in "The Trouble with Profiling" arguing against that position. Schneier made his bones in IT Security and has a really interesting blog that I regularly visit, Schneier on Security, and highly recommend.  

Both of these guys have rather large fan bases online – so these essays triggered some healthy discussion and flame wars between their flock.  As a follow-up, Harris initiated an exchange of emails with Schneier as the two combatants hashed out their positions. That collection of emails between Harris and Schneier is detailed in:

"To Profile or Not to Profile: Harris vs. Schneier"

I found the exchange informative and a good read. Warning -  it is long -  talk about a fatal flaw in today’s 140 character world.  I don’t think Harris fares well against Schneier. But then, there may be a large dose of confirmation bias on my part at work there.  It looks to me like Harris is “out of his element” (as Walter Sobchak yelled at Donnie Kerabatsos in 1998’s The Big Lebowski). Schneier isn’t a debater – he doesn’t really do the whole “talking points” things well – he designs security systems and analyzes risks and life-cycle costs and benefits and feasibility and operational procedures and a bunch of other boring attributes that contribute to successful systems engineering. 

I am left with the feeling that I have witnessed an exchange between an intelligent layman (who trusts his common sense and intuition) and a Subject Matter Expert. I do give major props to Harris for posting the exchange to his blog – an exchange that doesn’t really show him in the best light. That is a level of intellectual honesty that is rare these days. I hope y’all find that as interesting as I did – and now for something a little lighter….

Talk about things that you will never see again in our lifetime. The back story on the above photo: A friend’s ex used to be a Flight Attendant for a large US –based carrier. Before a flight to Dallas in 1997, she graciously snuck my three jabronis into the cockpit of a commercial airliner to meet the crew and pose for a photo. If that somehow happened in the current post-9/11 climate, I can only imagine the security shit storm that would go down. There is a good chance that, when the dust settled, my claim to fame in this world might be, not as the author of this quality weblog, but as the father of the first “Don’t Touch My Junk” dude.

(I have been biding time waiting for an opportunity in which I could insert the above awesome photo into a blog post. I hope it isn’t too terrible a reach.)