In an unfortunately over-elaborate comment on another fine blog, I responded to an argument against using racial, gender, religious, and age profiling against terrorism (such as, for example, in airport screening). Namely, that if such profiling was undertaken terrorist organizations would just switch to using agents which don't fit the profile and we'd all be worse off. I've been repeatedly surprised that this argument arises not only in idle blog comments, but is also made by otherwise more sensible people (e.g., Bruce Schneier) in far more elevated forums. As I'd hate to deprive my devoted readership of several individuals of any pearl of wisdom, let me explain in revised form why that argument makes very little sense.
Before dealing with the argument, let's aside a silly straw man often combined with it: That our only choices are (1) complete disregard for evident surface characteristics or (2) that we rely on stereotypical characteristics of terrorists to the exclusion of all other evidence. Option 2 means performing cavity searches on every young man with a tan and allowing grannies to carry bazookas over their shoulders onto airplanes as long as they also wear a cross, so it follows that Option 1 is the only sensible.
That is—of course—nonsense. Nobody advocates ignoring other indicators of suspiciousness or that any individual, regardless of appearance should be given an automatic pass. The question is whether stereotypical appearance factors should never be given any weight in making any discretionary investigatory decision or that sometimes they should be given some weight—i.e., to use a racial/ethnic/religious/age/gender profile.
To start with what we know: The vast majority of operatives of terrorist organizations seeking to murder Americans (and others) identified from past attempts are young Arab Muslim men. And most of the rest are at least three of the four.
From this it follows that persons of this description must be among the most plentiful, available, and easy to use resources available for such organizations. In other words, this demographic has the highest ratio of reward (in terms of dead or terrorized infidels) to organizational effort (in terms of money, time, and other resources). If another demographic had a better ratio, the terrorist organization would already have switched to them and costlessly increased their effectiveness.
That does not mean that there aren't blond-haired blue-eyed Norwegian grannies who converted to Islam and are now all hot to kill for Allah—surely there must be. What it does mean is that they must be much rarer, harder to use, and generally more expensive means of murdering infidels. If Osama Bin Laden had a granny brigade at his disposal he would already have unleashed it, rather than relying on such a non-diverse and identifiable set of operatives.
So what happens if we institute profiling? Young Arab Muslim men become much more likely to get caught and hence less useful tools. At the same time grannies, given the same amount of total enforcement effort and hassle, become at least a little less likely to get caught and hence more useful tools.
These two effects, while in opposite directions, are not of equal magnitude: The terrorist organization is much more hurt by the declining effectiveness of its chief type of asset than it is helped by the increased effectiveness of a type of recruit it already hardly used because of other reasons. So while there is presumably a shift in the terrorist organization's allocation of efforts, it will on net be worse off (and we better off) after the shift.
How much this hurts them (and helps us) depends on how much more expensive (in the above sense) grannies were for the terrorist organization than young Arab Muslim men before profiling. If currently there was only a slight advantage to using the latter, then the net harm on terrorist organizations of profiling would also be small and so would the net help for us.
While that is possible, this seems unlikely. Terrorist organizations are likely to very much prefer using their current demographic (and hence be hurt a great deal by profiling) for several reasons.
First, there is a substantial individual dispersion within each demographic. If the difference in average between recruits from the two demographics were small, the distributions would likely overlap and grannies would be underrepresented in the sample of terrorist, but still a substantial presence. Instead, we see them hardly at all. That means that the difference in average between the two demographics is likely large and shifting from one to the other would impose a large cost on the terrorist organization.
Second, the difference in inherent characteristics between the demographics as to suitability as terrorist agents are likely to be substantial. While there likely are some socially contingent factors, others are so fundamental and significant that I'd estimate them to have a large effect. Lutherans are inherently less likely to consider the majority population of Europe and the U.S. to be infidels worthy of death than Muslims are. Arabs and Muslims today have a far greater cultural acceptance and valorisation of suicide attacks and even terrorism in general. Norwegians are far less likely to feel—rightly or wrongly—profoundly racially alienated from Americans than Arabs are. And throughout history and almost all known cultures, the young and men have always shown far greater propensity—again for good or ill—for the sort of physically dangerous but potentially glorious pursuits like suicide terrorism.
Finally, and most importantly, it does not matter if my predictions—admittedly based in part on broad cultural stereotypes—for the effectiveness of racial/cultural/gender/religious profiling are correct because the practice itself will demonstrate the correct point for stopping:
At the point of maximum harm to terrorist organization efforts to kill us—and for us the optimum amount of profiling—grannies and young Arab Muslim men and everybody else will have become equally (in)effective. At that point, we would expect to observe terrorist organizations to use all demographics equally. By no means should one pursue profiling beyond that point as it would only help the terrorists.
In other words, keep profiling until the demographics of apprehended terrorists look like America. If it is good enough for the U.S. cabinet, it is good enough for Al Qaeda. And just think how pleased their diversity management consultants will be!
More seriously, I've discussed a superior way to compensate the vast majority of innocent young Arab Muslim men (and others) who are inconvenienced by profiling twice before.
