Jim Harper at Cato@Liberty (the Cato Institute blog) writes, “Recent reporting on the weakness of behavioral profiling in airports has overlooked a key dimension of the problem with it.”
People stopped and searched by government agents at airports based on behavioral profiling have been arrested in only 0.7% of cases; thus in general, these were unreasonable searches. Furthermore, people are arrested only on technicalities, never for actually doing something illegal that poses a risk to aviation, which is why the suspects are supposedly searched.
Behavioral profiling has a 0% success rate in finding threats to aviation. Behavioral profiling does not have a proximate relationship to securing against harm coming to commercial aviation.
The Fourth Amendment requires searches and seizures to be reasonable. Courts give law enforcement considerable leeway and often use the stamp “experienced officer” to grant the police broad authority to follow hunches. What we have here, though, is a basis for suspicion that has a 100% failure rate. It never finds what it is looking for…
If national security authorities developed a theory that vans with dented doors are likely to carry nuclear materials, this reasoning would allow the search of any van with dented doors. The consequence of a nuclear blast, of course, is thousands of times higher than an attack on aviation. But a wrong theory is still a wrong theory. The fact that searching vans for nuclear weapons turns up stolen goods 0.7% of the time would not save it. Arguing for the leeway to use a false basis for suspicion because of the size of the potential danger is simply a cleverly cloaked argument for a general warrant, which the Fourth Amendment prohibits.
(Click here to read the entire post.)
Behavioral profiling has some of the same problems as data mining, which is what the government does with the masses of data it collects on ordinary citizens. Digital-privacy advocates are correct in their fear of a government with the power to intrude into private transactions between citizens and to act on the information it’s collected. I can also recommend Jeff Jonas’s and Jim Harper’s Cato Policy Analysis, “Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining,” which like most Cato Institute reports is full of information and should give pause to innocent citizens who think a police state is no threat to them.
-TimK
