The drumbeat for racial profiling grows louder in New York City (thanks, DesiDancer):

Two elected New York City officials say Arabs should be targeted for searches on city subways. They claim the NYPD has been wasting time with random checks in its effort to prevent terrorism in the transit system… The New York Police Department said in a statement that racial profiling is illegal, of doubtful effectiveness and against department policy. [Link]

… they are most likely to be young Muslim men. Unfortunately, however, this demographic group won’t be profiled. Instead, the authorities will be stopping Girl Scouts and grannies… commuters need to be most aware of young men praying to Allah and smelling like flower water. [Link]

Even Tunku Varadarajan of the WSJ came out for profiling desis:

I find that I am–for the first time in my life–part of a “group” that is under broad but emphatic visual suspicion. In other words, I fit a visual “profile,” and the fit is most disconcerting… one must be satisfied either that profiling ought to be done or at least… that it isn’t something that “ought not to be done…” The practice cannot be rejected with the old moral clarity. The profiling process is not precisely racial but broadly physical according to “Muslim type…” [Link]

I’m pretty sure the 7/7 bombers did not leave the house all gulab attar-fabulous. It’s a practice more Arab than Pakistani, and the smell would have drawn too much attention. Racial profiling, the knee-jerk reaction to terrorist attacks on public transit, is a fool’s game. Instead of detecting inaccurate signatures (black, Arab, South Asian), the goal must be to detect behavior (carrying a bomb). The goal is accuracy. Otherwise you let deadly attacks succeed while wasting massive amounts of resources searching ordinary people.

The arms race between black hat and white hat has deep analogues in the military, the human immune system, antivirus tools, firewalls, spam filters and so on. In realm of computer security, behavior detection has utterly buried signature detection in terms of effectiveness. Signatures are trivial to spoof once you know what’s being looked for. Most viruses, worms and spam now mutate with every attack, it’s designed in from the beginning.

On 7/7, Al Qaeda switched from using Arabs to using Pakistanis and a Caribbean. Not two weeks later, they switched to using Africans. The pool of Muslim phenotypes is enormous; they can tap Chechens, Uzbeks, Filipinos, Indonesians, Chinese, Malays, white converts, black Americans, red-haired Kashmiris, blue-eyed Afghans. This is why the NYC mayor says the NYPD will use a true random sample instead of racial profiling. It’s not out of liberal fuzzy-mindedness, it’s because they’re being hard-nosed about saving lives. A race-based approach fails completely. It’s suicidal to rely on it.

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An innocent bystander is dead, shot by the good guys. Now the London mayor is claiming that Jean Charles de Menezes, the ‘South Asian-looking’ guy shot by British special forces, was actually a victim of terrorism rather than the cops. It’s Livingstone, I presume:

London Mayor Ken Livingstone described Mr Menezes as a “victim of the terrorist attacks”. [Link]

More innocent people could be shot dead by police… Scotland Yard’s chief admitted yesterday. [Link]

Livingstone’s statement is faulty moral calculus and actively blocks the solution. First and foremost, you must assign responsibility accurately, otherwise you’ll never fix the problem. The terrorist attacks are a contributing cause. The primary cause is the commando who held him down and shot him seven times in the head.

Shoot to kill is indeed a good policy when you’re highly certain the suspect is a suicide bomber. But the criteria have to be tightened and the threshold for action tweaked. We have empirical proof of it: it’s de Menezes’ body. ‘He ran’ and ‘he had brown skin’ aren’t reason enough to kill someone. The criminal justice system doesn’t execute or even imprison people for those reasons.

This is an issue apart from the terrorists, who are obviously mass murderers. It’s of interest because society holds sway over its government’s shoot-to-kill criteria in a way that it doesn’t over deluded, nihilist 19-year-olds. We grant governments a monopoly on the use of force precisely because they have the duty and the means to use it correctly.

Several nonlethal weapons which might work exist today: bomb jammers, stun guns, beanbag guns, rubber bullets, plastic bullets, pepperball guns, sticky shockers, immobilizing goo, veiling glare lasers, flash bang grenades, pain-inducing microwaves and millimeter wave body scanners for detecting explosives.

Even more advanced solutions such as electromagnetic pulse guns and microwave guns which only affect electronics are under development. Many waves (electromagnetic and laser) affect different materials in different ways, for example by discriminating between the human body and explosives or detonators. X-rays, CAT scans, surgical and dental lasers, and luggage scanners rely on a variety of these effects.

But when you say ‘it wasn’t our fault,’ when you go into denial, you immediately truncate the search for a fix and the R&D investment needed to solve the problem. Western militaries have invested significantly in technology to curtail friendly fire. It’s worth doing so for law enforcement as well.

Previous post here.

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