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I wouldn't count 80 year old men out as recruitment targets for suicide bombing.

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

But this is exactly what I'm talking about. If the direct cost of sending a suicide bomber goes from "transportation" to "transportation + $2,000,000", there will be less of it.

Certainly there are additional complexity issues and those work to the benefit of law enforcement. However, there are some significant costs as well.

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.

"Bruce Schneier likes to say this too, as if it makes sense." I think you missed his point when he says this. His point was, if you give people an easy way and a hard way, they'll choose the easy way. Bruce has made this clear.

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 :)

> 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.

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

Obviously, it's easier for the 80-year-old Laotian female to get through security (or they're just generally more competent, or whatever). But it's cheaper (80% of the cost), and more effective (25% more expected successes), to send 10 19-year-old Syrian men. So, in a world where these numbers were accurate, we'd expect to see terrorist organizations using young Arab men to make their attacks even though they're eight times less likely to clear security than 80-year-old Laotian women. That means the correct thing to do with extra security is to completely ignore the high success rates of 80-year-olds and try to drive the effectiveness of Arab teens even lower.

> 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.

"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)."

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.

Well, the first thing we can observe is that we're not getting attacks by these highly nonsuspicious types, so we can safely assume that for whatever reason they're not cost-effective (we do know that in fact nonsuspicious types get much less screening than suspicious types, so, theoretically, they should be 100% of attackers).

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.

"Well, the first thing we can observe is that we're not getting attacks by these highly nonsuspicious types, so we can safely assume that for whatever reason they're not cost-effective"

[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.

That presumes that recruitment is a limiting factor. Given that there are thousands, perhaps millions, of young, single, Arab men willing to martyr themselves for the cause, and roughly zero of them attempt to blow up or hijack US airliners, that doesn't seem to be the case.

> it's a win for us

Define "us"

The people the screening is supposed to protect. If you force terrorists to recruit from a group that is small and that is less likely to pull off the operation well, then everyone but the terrorists profits.

So "young, single, Arab men" not only aren't "us", but also aren't people who deserve protection from terrorism?

I'm glad that you can decide on their behalf that their rights are worth less than your imagined security.

He didn't say they aren't "us". They do legitimately and regularly fly and are thus those that are to be protected by the security mechanisms and thus by his/her definition a part of "us". Also that they are singled out for more intensive search does not mean they are not a part of "us".

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.

> 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.)