Abhi posted a link on our news tab to a story about…well, stupidity. Way to focus on the fine print, while actual, credible threats go unchecked.
For seven-year-old Javaid Iqbal, the holiday to Florida was a dream trip to reward him for doing well at school.
But he was left in tears after he was stopped repeatedly at airports on suspicion of being a terrorist.
The security alerts were triggered because Javaid shares his name with a Pakistani man deported from the US, prompting staff at three airports to question his family about his identity.
The family even missed their flight home from the U.S. after officials cancelled their tickets in the confusion. And Javaid’s passport now contains a sticker saying he has undergone highlevel security checks.
Little Javaid is a British citizen of Pakistani origin, which makes his “dream” of going to Florida-land as a reward for his good grades even more poignant, to me. The other Javaid is a 39-year old Pakistani who was arrested in connection with 9/11; while they convicted that Javaid of fraud and deported him, he was never charged with anything related to terrorism. His name, obviously, is a red flag for the exquisitely useful database/process which Homeland Security created…you know, the one which apparently doesn’t bother cross-checking birthdays in order to discern the difference between two or more people who share a name.
Because of this cluster, Javaid’s parents are debating a name-change for their unfortunately-nomenclated* offspring, and I don’t blame them, though I can only imagine how frustrated and resentful they might be. September 12, 2001…the day common sense commenced its slow and horrific death.
I found the reactions from people who had read the article interesting. Illuminating, even.
Said Craig from London:
Poor kid, my passport was mistakenly stamped with the incorrect stamp when transiting though Australia a few years back, the immigration bloke realised it and crossed out the initial stamp and re-stamped it correctly but I still often get asked “why were you refused entry to Australia” when going through immigration. Still if simply changing your name is enough to bypass the system it shows how utterly pointless the US no-fly list is.
Said THIS whiner winner from our good ole country:
Sorry his family is feeling “alienated.” This is post-9/11 reality. I feel alienated from air travel, too, when I’m frisked, questioned and forced to remove my shoes, belts, etc. just to board a plane. Questioning the whole family in this case was perfectly reasonable. The kid had the same name as someone who committed passport fraud. It was not unreasonable to consider the possiblity that this kid’s and his parents’ papers were fraudulent.
I also question the choice of T-shirt he is wearing in the picture. I wouldn’t wear a t-shirt that read “Armed and Ready” when travelling via airplanes, or when I was talking to the press about how unfairly I was treated.
– Thomas, Indiana, United States
My initial response to “Thomas” was a hearty “STFU”, but that has been drowned out by the roaring chorus of, “America…F*ck yeah!“
*Yeah, I know. It’s not a real word. Don’t get your chuddies all bunched, yaar.
sakshi – I shouldn’t have clicked on your link. I feel even more depressed now. Oh well, at least my genes will end with me.
Thank you Thomas for representing the Hoosier state so well :).I feel horrible for the kid honestly, but these types of things don’t faze me anymore. My younger cousin, who also happened to be 7, was flying from Indianapolis to San Francisco last spring and was stopped because her name showed on the no-fly list. Well, she didn’t choose having the last name “Hussein”, and she was taken away from her parents and questioned for 45 minutes. Luckily she did not have any more questioning afterwards and was cleared to go onto the flight, but I find it ridiculous and appalling that kids have to go through this treatment. I guess she was fortunate that she was an American citizen born and raised in Carmel, Indiana so that she did not have to go through more security checks.
sarah – i commented on pasco and pinellas as a result of the story of arresting small kids in st petersburg times. I know that racism is widespread in the Tampa Bay area – I taught a few black kids in Tampa.
Once my erstwhile partner and I were the only non-white persons at a July 4 fireworkds / celebration. I was so happy coz nearly everyone ignored us 😉 – when one comes from a country where everyone stares at a stranger it was quite liberating. This was post 9-11.
Here is another piece of genius. Once when a security person rejected my contact lens solution as larger than 3 oz, i asked her if I could bring two separate bottles with differnet liquids as long as each is small enough. She said yeah. So a terrorist can divy up the liquids in different containers disguised as two differnet products.
cookiebrown @ 49 – are you a naturalized citizen? or have a name reflecting an ethnic/religious group that is on any security list? not that it should matter, but i’m a native-born citizen, and i’m pretty brown in skin colour, but i have never been pulled for questioning since 9/11 (though almost always i am taken aside for a ‘random’ bag/shoe search), so i’m wondering what would explain these differences.
i know people are shocked by the stupidity of this incident, but e.g. women used to be considered less of a threat until more of them became prominent in terrorist activities. perhaps the logic is that nobody should be protected from suspicion – i.e. you can never be too careful. of course, in practise, the officials are missing some pretty big signs, and discriminating as to who is a ‘potential’ anything. still, i’m sure this is the logic they would use when called out.
ahh…the lifting of the glass cieling. i love it.
puli, even that is a sort of progress for gender equality, isn’t it?
sure. reminds me of this quote by Alexis de Tocqueville “Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.” qually bad is still equal…
except, we’re not really equal, right? it’s only brown women who join the brown men in their potential terrorist status. i don’t see white men or women looked at with the same scrutiny, at least not in this country.
maybe. hard for me to comment. ive never been searched or anything. i felt very well treated post 9/11. maybe if i had a turban and a bears people would look at me differently.
beard
I think the sentence is funnier if you leave it saying “bears”
oh..no one would f-ck with me if i had bears…
😛 I think I’m going to bring some bears in turbans when I fly in two weeks. Then no one will complain about my kids saying bye bye airplane. 😛
I personally do not have a problem with profiling …. AS LONG AS IT IS INTELLIGENT PROFILING. When you process so many people, it becomes a numbers game as one can never guarantee 100% safety. Profiling is a necessary tool. It is just not smart to search an old white woman in detail unless she is driving a pickup truck near a federal building. When cops pull over a black guy, there better be other guys that tip them off that he is a drug dealer, not just the fact that he is black. I can say that after I started buzzing my head, I have been pulled over a lot more often maybe because cops think I am black. I understand why a black guy may snap over an innocent search because they have reached their breaking point. The guy who got shot 41 times in NYC didn’t even fit the profile of a suspected rapist on the run other than his skin color.
I think brown people, especially Muslims will reach their breaking point too if these kind of inconveniences become more than an “inconvenience”.
profiling should never be based on a purely visual criteria. Because the people bent on causing you harm aren’t stupid, they know the profile, and actively try to dodge it.
what do terrorists do if you just ignore them?
Kill you.
Mohammed Salameh, who had rented the truck and reported it stolen, kept calling the rental office to get back his $400 deposit. The FBI arrested him there on March 4, 1993. In short order, the Bureau had several plotters in custody, including Nidal Ayyad, an engineer who had acquired chemicals for the bomb, and Mahmoud Abouhalima, who had helped mix the chemicals
Pravin, profiling is one thing, but it’s another when your only criteria is skin color or real/perceived race. This kind of bigoted laziness diverts resources away from more effective “crime-solving” strategies.
My friend is Muslim and shares his name with a terrorist on the no-fly list. He works for a major Canadian corporation and has to fly down to the States every month for Engineering meetings. Despite government business documentation, Canadian citizenship, etc he has to arrive at the airport 4 hours early every time for the back room confessional. I don’t think a little sticker is going to save this kid from the horror of Homeland Security. Many brown Canadians avoid travelling to the States because of border harrasement, America is losing out on Canadian $ big time.
Wasnt that my point?
HMF, This is a first .I am completely in agreement with you !
What is the face of terrorism? Is it the brown bearded guy with the Saudi passport,the black clean shaven guy with the British passport or the vanilla white guy iwth the US passport ? Answer: ALl of the above.Remember Timothy McVeigh? The Unabomber?The FBI spent a lot of time chasing the non existentIslamic terrorist after Oklahoma. The problem with racial profiling is that the moment the bad guys know you are looking for one profile,they start using others. In Delhi – at the height of the security issues with the Punjab problem etc – the police stopped only cars with young men at checkpoints. Any vehicle with women and/or children was allowed through.The terrorists promptly began recruiting young women to be passive passengers….
Mohammed Salameh, who had rented the truck and reported it stolen, kept calling the rental office to get back his $400 deposit. The FBI arrested him there on March 4, 1993. In short order, the Bureau had several plotters in custody, including Nidal Ayyad, an engineer who had acquired chemicals for the bomb, and Mahmoud Abouhalima, who had helped mix the chemicals
This is like straight out of a Jay Leno stupid criminals bit. Still doesn’t prove profiling works.
HMF, This is a first .I am completely in agreement with you !
Wait 5 mins.
I can’t believe I am actually going to be the pro-Profiler on this thread. Profiling is not meant to be foolproof. It just maximizes your chances of catching someone when used correctly. The problem with race based profiling is that it is used lazily without looking at multiple factors.
But despite my pro profiling comments, I think airport security is a joke. All it takes is for some airport personnel to be bribed. Having a secure cockpit door with a video camera on the cabin and passengers in no mood to wait for a negotiation is enough of deterrant to a repeat of 9-11.
It gets really ridiculous when you get patted down in NFL stadiums. I can understand for the SB, but regular season games? Do you know at one point, there were suggestions in some areas that movie theaters could use extra security? Ridiculous.
I misread 🙂
The problem with race based profiling is that it is used lazily without looking at multiple factors.
I agree if those factors are spread over time. But if the object of profiling is to catch the assailant right before they’re about to do the deed, based primarily or exclusively on visual factors, the chances of catching them really amount to sheer dumb luck.
Here’s a recent incident where the TSA claims profiling helped:
It depends on what they mean by ‘suspicious behavior’ too often that means, having X,Y,Z (not W) skin. Otherwise it could be an example of pure dumb luck.
I gotta clarify – I thought we were discussing racial profiling, hence my remark in # 73 .Profiling on the basis of “suspicious behavior” – well,DOH! Thats what I expect the TSA to be doing.That kind of profiling ( behavioral and NOT just skin color/appearance) is an absolute necessity for law enforcement
I gotta clarify – I thought we were discussing racial profiling
Depending on the context, race and religion cannot be ruled out: Most serial killers : white (yes, there have been a few non-White serial killers, but the majority have been white). Most abortion clinic bombers: Christian (I doubt any atheists have been arrested for that crime). Most terrorists in the past 5 years : Muslim. Context is required.
only problem, muslims cannot be visually identified as easily as the white majority thinks. Muslims in Turkey look nothing like Muslims in Somilia.
thats easy. clamp down on funny lookin ferners. thats what the point of profiling is anyways. when tim mcveigh blew up a federal building, no one associated whyte with bombing. after WTC, terrorism = funny lookin brown guy.
Also depends on what you classify as terrorism. I personally think that wing-nuts who torch synagogues and mosques, burn crosses in front yards, and murder innocent taxi drivers are pretty effective at terrorizing communities here in the U.S.
the logical ones will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes….the only terrorists are the funny lookin ferner ones that hate america..
Once again, it is all about what context that piece of information is applied to. It is not a visual attribute, but does govern motivations and behavior. Christians who bomb clinics or PETA members who attack animal testing labs don’t look a certain way but their beliefs do point to certain personal aspects that can be profiled and tracked.
Actually, Ekman is onto something. The microexpressions he’s talking about are what Malcolm Gladwell talks about in “Blink.” They are some of the most reliable and hard-to-conceal signs of intent for human behavior.
Unfortunately, I would agree with your assessment based on the “56 hours of training” they go through. I’m sure there are “macro” behaviors and expressions that may be useful to look for, but the people in the Gladwell essays (and even Ekman himself) have literally tens of years of experience.
You can read an excerpt of the how-it-works version of it here.
Somebody should build a Voight Kampff machine…
It could be done. And then we could force all the suspicious 7-year-olds with scary names to stand in front of the weird machine!
I like it.
tamasha (#21) and dave (#45):
i am with you both. for millenia, humans have been fooled into awwwing and cuddling the little monsters. time to show them! even while posing for the picture above, i am sure javaid is thinking of his secret nook lair stash.
Once again, it is all about what context that piece of information is applied to.
You’re stretching far beyond the scope of my comment. Sure, if information is gathered earlier, and investigated and vetted, and data much beyond visually identifiable criteria is taken into account, then sure, some degree of profiling would be useful.
Vikram, Interesting observation. 1) Is this in the USA only? Since this is still White majority nation , I would not read too much into gross numbers 2)Another intersting fact: Serial killers- usually they kill within their own racial group .Don’t know if taht has any bearing on the dicussion on terrorists though
And since we are discussing profiling on the basis of appearance check this out .Once we accept that its okay to target people only because of the way the look , this is what will happen all the time
Here’s some information. Don’t know how much this applies to countries other than the US.
Yeah, and here’s what happens when agents in the field are hamstrung by bureaucratic paper pushers …
I am not sure that suppressing the human rights of a seven year old will keep the world safe from terrorism.
However, I think if the TSA applies a little bit of common sense that just might help the situation quite a bit.
Oh lord. This is bad, and it’s endemic. One of my distant nephews, who is seven years old, was kept waiting for six hours at the US embassy in Islamabad because his name matched that of someone in the security database. Following that, his passport was kept by the embassy for almost a year, because they were “still verifying that he isn’t a threat”.
Moments such as this one are why Salon.com’s “Ask the Pilot” has articles about how Air New Zealand is deliberately going out of its way to advertise flights that avoid the US. Can’t say I blame them. If I’m flying anywhere that has a transit through the US, I now re-route my flight to go through somewhere else. It’s just too much bullshit to deal with.