It was bound to happen sooner or later and this past weekend it happened to me. My black backpack was searched. It wouldnÂ’t have been remarkable if it happened at a mass transit checkpoint. After all, statistically there was a good chance since I take the New York City subway and LIRR trains on a daily basis. But my brush with long arm of the law took place about 50 miles from Manhattan while standing in line to board a ferry to Fire Island.
For those of you not from the New York area, Fire Island is a small island off the coast of the southern fork of Long Island, New York. In the 1930s and 40s it was a haven for artists and writers and slowly turned into a summer retreat for mostly gays and lesbians. Today, Fire Island is synonymous with “gay beach”.
My wife son and I were with in line with our friends (a lesbian couple and their baby) waiting to board the ferry. As they opened the gate, and the line started to move, I shuffled along with the others in line. Right before I got I stepped on board, I was approached by a man in dark glasses. If he had asked me for my number, I would have been flattered.
“Sir, do you mind stepping aside? I just need to check your backpack.”
It sounded like a request. But it wasnÂ’t.
“Sure”, I said, and stood there while he checked my bag which was still strapped to my back.
After a cursory glance, he said “All done. That’s it”
As I began to leave, he said “Hold on, let me zip you up first”
He closed my bag and I stepped on to the ferry to join my family and friends.
After taking a seat on the top deck I looked to see if others were being checked. No one else was under scrutiny. Our friends who were renting a place on the island for the weekend met as us and while we were settling in one of them asked “Did they stop and check you before you boarded the ferry?”
“Yes” I replied, “Did they check you too?”
“Yeah, they checked my bag and after that I stepped out of line to see if they were doing this to others. I stood there counting to see if it was every 5th person or if there was a method. But I was the only one they searched.”
Now I must add that my friend who was searched is gay, Guyanese (Indian descent) and dark-skinned and I of course had a three day growth of beard.
I’d like to think they were screening us to make sure weren’t smuggling in anything that would take away from the “fabulousness” of the island.
Dude, that’s crazy — I got searched in the same way on the very same ferry two weeks ago. They seem to be completely blatant about it.
The thing they need to realize is, no terrorist anywhere has ever even heard of Fire Island.
Incidentally, there are some ‘straight’ beaches on Fire Island too (i.e., Ocean Beach).
And a completely irrelevant thing: I saw a lady on the beach there getting a ticket from a police officer for eating grapes. Not only are the Fire Island police ‘fabulous’ with their little electric golf carts (no cars allowed on the island), but if you eat fruit on the beach, you’re paying a fine. It’s that kind of place.
My friends and I were true scofflaws on the beach there. We had open bottle of Corona and other snacks. I’m lucky not to be at Gitmo in an orange jumpsuit and eating two kinds of fruit!
Turbanhead, Do you wear a Turban ? If you do, you will probably be stopped every single time. I was talking to a turbanned dude yesterday and he told me that if he goes through a place where the security is doing ‘random checks’, he has a 100% chance of being stopped. He also had a beard so that might have something to do with it. I wonder about how many people have shaved their beards or removed turbans because of the heightened security atmosphere in the US these days.
Alas, despite my moniker. I am sans turban. But I do look swarthy.
Al Mujahid,
I wonder about how many people have shaved their beards or removed turbans because of the heightened security atmosphere in the US these days.
Some, but not that many. The bigger, er, cut-off is with Sikhs in the service industry (i.e., people working at gas stations or driving taxis), who have to deal with racist B.S. and/or the threat of violent assault on a daily basis. Most of those guys have cut their hair. The Sikh taxi drivers who continue to wear turbans to work are very brave and thick-skinned men.
At airports, you do see some Sikhs on the ‘down low’ with baseball caps and bandanas instead of full turbans. I’m not sure how this helps, since they are still brown bearded men who look nervous as hell.
Personally, the extra scrutiny doesn’t bug me that much as long as the searches are dignified and reasonable. A little extra scrutiny I can handle. (Though I should point out to Tunku that it’s of questionable constitutionality, and also extremely dubious in terms of effectiveness.)
Handcuffs and bomb squads on the merest whiff of suspicion, however, are unacceptable.
Tunku Varadarajan’s cavalier attitude towards profiling might have something to do with the fact that he probably never gets confused for Arab. With the South Asians being the new suspect class, lets see whether he changes his opinion in the next few months.
But hey, they ARE committed to bag searches, so doesnt it make more sense for them to search the bags of all who look likely to have a bomb, rather than piously doing the ” 1,2,3,4…. yes, here, that granny on the walker is our fifth, lets search her medication kit. ” kind of thing? And I feel its foolish to talk about why Blacks are not being profiled. We know that the 7/14 bombers were not “blacks” in the popular sense of the word – okay, except maybe for the Caribbean guy. The average East African Muslim doesnt really look much like your next-ally “What’s up, Dawg?” dude. ANd dont keep saying “it wont be long before an White convert bombs a bus”. Its irrefutable that most of the terrorists we are talking about are islamist militants, and they are for the most part young Arabs/SouthAsians. I cant remember a black American Muslim bomber. And I sure as hell can’t imagine the “blonde sardar” somebody talked about in some post. ANd, every one of us are being profiled everytime we get on a bus or a subway with a backpack. Being picked out and searched is only an extension of that. I think having the searchers at the subway would be totally useless unless they searched the likely looking parties. That way, even though we may still be vulnerable to the very unlikely (as of yet) white bomber, we’d stil be better covered for the more likely “desi/Arab” bomber.
The Palestinians have been using women and kids as bombers. Profiles are easily defeated.
If you’re claiming that Africans in street clothes don’t look like black Brits, they certainly do to the untrained eye.
It won’t be long before a suicidal goth teen bombs a bus, then. Why not stop all of them with body scanners?
‘Every one of us is being undressed in someone else’s imagination. Being raped is only an extension of that.’
You’ve got it backwards. Static profiles are only useful against an unchanging enemy. Given an intelligent, adaptive opponent, only truly random searches are effective.
Your comment is a litany of why conventional wisdom is wrong. Fortunately the NYC cops aren’t following your methodology.
… dont keep saying “it wont be long before an White convert bombs a bus”.
I keep wondering what would happen if a very angry, very traumatized Bosnian teenager whose father and older brothers were killed and whose mothers and sisters were raped when he was a young child, who remembers the years we did nothing, gets recruited by an OBL type. Or, for that matter, a girl. I’m not saying they’d be right. I’m just saying I keep wondering if it will happen.
Manish, what is this “truly random” thing you talk about? Surely, checking every 5th person is not random at all and extremely easy to beat. Do you propose using beta decay machines or noise on i810 chipsets to create a truly random search? If so, please calculate the (near 100%) probability of an attack when twenty bombers pass consecutively through such a searching device. Of course, if everybody has to be searched then there is no randomness. Also, any ‘system’ you design will have some hard-coded areas (system “profiles” if you will) it will check, thus a future bomber will know exactly what needs to be avoided. Wouldn’t it actually be easier to beat a system which by nature won’t adapt as fast as humans in this problem domain? Who is more static a system or humans? Software is one thing, but your general-purpose testing system needs to have some physicality to interact with the actual world and its bombers. How would the system adapt it’s physicality on new information without the help of humans, thus slowly its adaptive rate? If your general-purpose testing system adapts as fast as humans then do you have a human? Will your humanoid take over the world, will we still need police?
Babloo, I propose using a quantum cipher seeded with the frequency of the highest note hit by a hefty soprano in the next performance of Wagner put on by the Met. How will we know we’ve achieved true randomness? Well, it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings.
Oh I’m sorry. Are we talking about an enemy capable of assuming apearances at will? Like that dude in T2?
No. Also, the terrorists we are talking about are not Basque Separatists, or Tim McVeighs or Shoko Asaharas. The folks the police are concerned about right now are Islamic fundamentalists. And they tend to look a certain way. What percentage of people riding the subway look that way? Defenitely not more than 20%. I think the police should search these people more intensively than the others. I mean, not getting a bomber because he was fourth in line while the Girl Scout was fifth sounds stupid.
I am not advocating the bag searching or profiling at all. And Im not denying that a white Islamic bomber might come along soon. But since the searches have been instituted and we cant wish just them away, they might as well serve the purpose, and this seems to me to be the best bet. And if you want mathematics with that, try “pattern”.
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So they started getting the women and children searched too, now. And still the suicide bombings continued. But who were the bombers? Do you ever remeber hearing about a Bosnian Muslim/ Goth chick/ Shaquille O’Neal helping out by going over and bombing a bus in Jerusalem? No. ANd can you imagine the Israelis resorting to “random techniques” for their security searches? I cant seem to.
Interloper, you don’t seem to have read my profiling post, which is linked in my comments above and right on the front page.
We should be body-scanning everyone. Automatically. What’s going to be more accurate, looking for people or looking for bombs?
If we do manual checks in addition, we should be using a truly random sample.
Every fifth person is neither thorough nor random. It’s, well, every fifth person. Easily predictable and useless. Nothing but a show of force, security theater.
You are quick to dismiss non-Muslim bombers, but consider this: you can’t tell whether someone’s a Muslim fundamentalist by the way they look. And the instant a white John Walker Lindh, a Latino Jose Padilla or black Richard Reid comes along, the profile is instantly thrown out the window, rendered absolutely useless.
No, they don’t. That’s flat wrong.
You’ve seen Al Qaeda use three different races in two weeks, right in front of your face– not a single one of them Arab. And yet you deny the evidence of your own eyes and fixate on a phenotype. Do you not watch the news? Why the cognitive dissonance?
In this country we’ve seen bombs built by Eric Rudolph, Terry McVeigh, the Columbine teens (the bomb didn’t go off) and so forth. All focused on creating mass destruction.
You can chase after the bombers, but you pay the price in blood. You need to get ahead of their adaptation cycle, not drag along behind them patching one hole after another.
In this case, the conventional wisdom is not just dead wrong, it’s downright dangerous.