Since the recent failed terrorist attack on that Nigerian dude, I’ve been thinking about how my views about profiling terrorist have changed.
I used to think that at the airport those with a Muslim name and from an Arab country should be giving a little harder time, especially if they are males in their twenties, before boarding a plane (even a congressman from New York was calling for racial profiling at the airport after the latest incident). After thinking about it, however, I think racial profiling is ineffective for three reasons.
(1) The War on Drugs
See many people, regardless of their race or gender, get harassed a little more at the airport because they are suspected of carrying drugs. I had to do jury duty one time and on trial was an elderly white woman caught for trafficking cocaine from Columbia! So really anybody could fit the profile of a “drug mule” and therefore regardless of what you look like you could be harassed a little more than another traveler.
(2) Terrorist are becoming Smarter
Before I thought it would be easy to zone in on the bad guys because all you would have to do is find the one’s with the Muslim name. Well not anymore, suspected terrorist David Headley, changed his name to a “white name” to hide his Muslim identity.
(3) Crazy people are not Arab-looking
Before 911, the worst terrorist attack in US history was by Timothy Mcveigh, a crazy white guy who was just fed up with the American government so he decided to blow up a federal building. So we can’t just look at Arabs and Africans as guys that will blow up a plane, because it is just as likely a crazy White guy will do it as well.
Faced with these facts about “racial profiling”, I think a better strategy for airports in regards to passenger security, because drug trafficking is a whole other issue, is the implementation of “culture profiling”. Every passenger should be asked a simple question about American pop-culture. Since all the people crazy enough to blow themselves up on a plane haven’t watched any television in their lives (cause if they did they wouldn’t want to kill us), it is easy to weed them out with simple pop-culture trivia.
Think about it, all the guys who drove planes into the World Trade Center or who went gun buck in Mumbai, we’re all from impoverished rural upbringings and would have no idea who played the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I mean really if you don’t know that you must be crazy and locked up indefinitely. But all jokes aside, I think we need much better security at the airport as it’s really not hard to spot the trouble makers. I used to work in retail and could tell which people we’re the shoplifters, which people we’re going to give a hard time with their returns and which people would be the assholes. After you work in an environment with people for a while, it almost becomes a sixth sense. Come to think of it maybe I should do airport security?
