On #1: If the TSA didn't frisk 80 year old men, any smart terrorist would begin recruiting 80 year olds. You can't have gaps in enforcement by policy or they will be exploited (sadly).
It doesn't. Your hypothetical terrorist group can't recruit with equal ease from any demographic group that strikes their fancy. So if we screen everyone equally, all[1] of the terrorists will be young single men.
If we start screening young, single, Arab men so heavily that it's more economical for a terrorist group to recruit Laotian grandmothers, that's exactly what we want. It will dramatically reduce the incidence of attacks, because it's extremely difficult to convince Laotian grandmothers to make them.
The optimal way to allocate screening resources is to produce the result that everyone is equally likely to be a terrorist. But you can't begin by assuming it; it's the goal you want to reach. If there's a demographic group with an elevated risk of offending, we want to dedicate screening to it until it has only the baseline risk. Even if that raises the baseline risk, it's a win for us.
With all that in mind, screening a particular group at a 0% rate won't get you there. But screening 80-year-olds at 0.001% of the rate you screen men 15-25, or less, is probably fine.
[1] most
Traditionally, the rate of suicide among men only goes up as they get older and in the US is at ~29/100k/year after 65 years. If a group were well-funded they could make this an attractive offer to take care of families for folks who had no assets to pass on. The have less to look forward to and thus less to lose/more to gain. This already happens in other ways besides suicide bombing.
I think the perception that most terrorists are young single men demonstrates less about their willingness to blow themselves up than what they're willing to trade blowing themselves up for. Young single men, especially poorly educated ones, are generally dreadfully bad at cost-benefit analysis and planning for their futures. Terrorist groups tend to be incredibly poorly funded without state sponsorship and then it all depends on which state.
Tangentially, all[1] decisions are economic decisions.
[1] most
How confident really, is one that you aren't going to find 80 year old men willing to give their last few years of life for what they believe, money aside, or do we care whether their spouses are still alive?
The other real major cost is the social cost. If we do start making really fine-grained decisions regarding appearance, married status, etc. then we risk essentially ensuring that Americans are not equal before our government and that's something that is really hard to put a price on, particularly given the history of racial issues in the US.
So replace recruit with "coerce" if you like.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2086353/Paul-Bradley...
Nothing you say changes this point - if you make it easy for 80 year olds to get through security, 80 year olds will be the ones with bombs. Whether by recruiting, coercion, or anything.
I'm really not sure why you would think otherwise, and your argument about recruiting rates, while possibly correct, is, well, irrelevant :)
The whole point of my comment is to refute this idea, so I guess I'm in trouble. Let me try to phrase things differently.
For every person in the world, there is a cost to recruit them into your organization as an attacker, which I postulate is low for young Arab men and high for Laotian grandmothers (and also high for 80-year-olds generally). Call this cost function COST(x).
There is also a likelihood that if they attempt an attack, they will succeed. Call this EFFECTIVENESS(x).
I can only interpret "if you make it easy for 80 year olds to get through security, 80 year olds will be the ones with bombs. Whether by recruiting, coercion, or anything" as saying that a terrorist group sending an attacker t will strictly try to maximize EFFECTIVENESS(t). But that's wrong. A terrorist group sending an attacker t will try to maximize EFFECTIVENESS(t)/COST(t).
Imagine some categories like so:
Age Sex Ethnicity EFFECTIVENESS COST
19 M Syrian 10% $20,000
80 M Egyptian 60% $150,000
80 F Laotian 80% $250,000
> your argument about recruiting rates, while possibly correct, is, well, irrelevant :)
I'm not making an argument about recruiting rates; point me to where I mentioned the concept. I'm making an argument about recruiting costs. Doesn't matter why the cost is what it is, or whether your attackers are there voluntarily.
If you are including the cost of coercion in COST(X), then i strongly disagree with your theory that there is a huge cost differential between young arab men and 80 year old laotian grandmas.
Maybe you can explain why you believe there is?
It seems, for example, that holding the family member of an 80 year old grandma hostage is cheap and effective as a mechanism of recruitment.
The real beauty of this logic is that it doesn't actually matter if it's correct. If it is, great -- we need to harass suspicious types even more than we already are. But maybe it isn't. If terrorist groups are sending suspicious attackers for irrational or idiosyncratic reasons... that doesn't matter to us! We're trying to defend against the people they do send, not the people we think they should send. So we need to harass suspicious types again.
That said, there are plenty of heavy costs associated with kidnapping foreigners from around the world and using them as hostages:
1. The language barrier. If you want to coerce someone, you need to be able to make them understand what you want them to do.
2. Security. Your target country will hate you and make great efforts to root you out. These groups survive in countries where they have popular support. Pakistan might be willing to look the other way while you hang out and make trouble for the US; they're much less likely to look the other way while you kidnap and threaten to kill Pakistanis.
3. Public relations. Again, these groups survive where they have a certain level of popular support. But the same populace that doesn't really care when bad things happen to the Great Satan might not feel the same way about randomly kidnapping and killing bystanders from around the world.
4. Morale. The internal reflection of public relations. Most of the people in the group are there because they think it's the right thing (or can be talked into it). Kidnapping and killing peaceful foreigners from around the world could be a blow to that. Telling 80-year-old women to kill themselves just doesn't feel like the right thing.
[citation needed]
For example, there were plenty of IRA bombings by older folks, etc. Even if you only consider airplanes, there have been hijackings, suspected bombings, etc by older folks.
Just because today's media focuses on certain ethnotypes and attacks does not make them actually predominant in actual attacks.
Define "us"
I'm glad that you can decide on their behalf that their rights are worth less than your imagined security.
I do agree with you though that this kind of ethnic screening has a ton of ethical problems. And that airport security is mostly security theater.
Agreed 100%. We'd be better off without most of it.
> this kind of ethnic screening has a ton of ethical problems
This, obviously, is a value judgment. If you think ethnic screening is unworkable for ethical reasons, that's fair. But you need to acknowledge that, by giving up ethnic screening, you're purposefully making your security less effective -- you would rather see some additional people die to terrorism, and some additional non-ethnics harassed in precisely the way you don't want to see happen to ethnics, than dirty your hands with ethnic screening.
(I habitually take a fairly aggressive tone. I really don't care whether you make the call one way or the other -- but I do care that, if that's what you believe, you should cop to it.)
To make it concrete: Do you skip screening of the young pregnant Irish woman? I hope not. That was Anne-Marie Murphy, whose boyfriend put Semtex and a timer in her bag. [1]
Do you skip screening of the attractive blonde woman? Sorry, that was hijacker Leila Khaled with a blonde wig and hidden grenades. [2]
(These are both very interesting stories and I recommend reading the links below.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindawi_affair
[2] http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2001-09-28/news/0109280226_...
The Anne-Marie Murphy example is interesting; as you point out, she was sabotaged and didn't know she was carrying explosives. So -- she would pass demographic profiling with flying colors, as she should. She didn't want to do anything. The very commonly suggested approach of behavioral profiling is also useless here. People who believe they're not carrying explosives act exactly the same as people who really aren't carrying explosives.
Network analysis ("passenger's boyfriend is Arab") could flag her. Would you support that?
The comment above makes the dreaded profiling word seem like a dirty thing, it should be a perfectly acceptable thing. Follow Israel's lead and behavior profile people as soon as they step into the airport and flag them appropriately.
http://www.examiner.com/article/exactly-what-are-israeli-air...
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
People who are acting out of the ordinary.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
http://www.internationalpolicydigest.org/2012/06/19/what-isr...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11...