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How Israel handles airport security

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Re: How Israel handles airport security

#161

Post by darklajid »

shin_lao wrote: post #120
coffeemug wrote: post #103

I cannot believe people bring up Israeli airport security as an example of a system the U.S. should model. The security agents are neither intelligent, nor well trained, nor polite. The entire system is based on racism and I would take TSA security over the Israeli model any day. People were complaining here about a pat down search in public by a TSA agent equaling sexual harassment. I was actually taken to a public…

You are just one data point.

That's only true in this very limited set here. Add me as a second one:

I'm white, male, as uninteresting as it can get (heh..). A little geeky perhaps, but I'm > 30 and every now and then have to prove that I'm > 18 for purchases or contracts. You know - the "Ohhh, you are really an adolescent?" type of guy. I shave every ~2 weeks and you probably cannot tell if I'm one week into the routine if we meet.

Still: Every single trip to IL ended with me being on the list of the suspicious people.

* I only did business trips and had a letter of the company that expected me (already crap on its own, but.. different thing)

* I travelled there several times and I'm sure they are good enough to correlate travelers from our german branch to our headquarter as being "probably genuine"

So.. A guy, plain as can be, fitting none of the discussed racial profiles (and no, I'm not shitting my pants during interviews either, so don't start the "you behaved erratic" thing), being targeted everytime: Another datapoint for the problems of the system.

I don't know _why_ I was targeted. I can only confirm that for me, every time I fly to Israel, these guys do waste time and money on me (and annoy me in the process, but let's ignore that for now), producing no result. Efficient? Not for me..

Re: How Israel handles airport security

#162

Post by srean »

jwr wrote: post #118
idan wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BS. Rebuttal follows. The screeners have no problem distinguishing Israeli Arabs and Sephardic Jews. 30 seconds of conversation -- if not simpler cues such as clothing -- will resolve any ambiguity. Israeli Arabs might not always be hassled, but they are certainly lined up for "increased scrutiny" more often. A lot more often. I have enough friends who can attest to this experience. I cannot count the number of times…

Isn't that how it is supposed to be, though? I mean, apply some bayesian reasoning about the probability of someone being a terrorist _given that_ he looks like an Arab and/or is Muslim — and you won't be surprised some people are screened more thoroughly. Had the world evolved differently, they might be paying increased attention to white males with freckles and red hair. The US for some reason likes to pretend that…

Statistical reasoning and Bayesian in particular, is frequently misunderstood in spite of its simplicity. It is also preferred that Bayes be spelled in caps. Just for arguments sake, let us assume that an Arab lookalike is more likely to blow up a plane. (digression: I also amuse myself by trying to look like one before flying, at least to the TSO.)

The short answer to the source of the misunderstanding is that one usually forgets to take into account that there are far less Arab lookalikes than non Arab lookalikes. A common mistake is to go with the conditional probability rather than the posterior.

The probability that an Arab is a terrorist, strictly speaking, the empirical conditional probability is the number of Arab with an intent to blow up the plane divided by the total number of Arab in the population under consideration. For arguments sake let me agree with you that this is higher than the corresponding conditional probability for a non-Arab. Lets represent these quantities by pa and pb respectively.

The likelihood ratio that an Arab lookalike will blow up a plane is then (pa * Pa) / (pb * Pb) where Pa and Pb are the probabilities that a random sample from the population is an Arab vs non-Arab. What are known as the priors. Here we have Pb >> Pa.

In order to justify that Arabs be selectively screened it is necessary that

   pa > ( pb * Pb )/(Pa).
This becomes equivalent to the condition pa > pb when Pb = Pa.

So I suspect that if anyone is sticking fingers in your ears and shouting loudly "can't hear you!". isnt quite, as you put it, "The US".

There are other issues:

It is hard to argue that pa is indeed greater than pb, i.e. for random samples of equal size there would be more terrorists in the Arab sample than not. Its quite a radical statement and justifications should have been mandatory.

Also I disagree with your assertion that "Had the world evolved differently,..." things would have been different. My counterexample is that the Irish or the Catholics in US were not subjected to any of this on flights to Britain when the IRA were bombing away innocent civilians there. BTW this is not the only counterexample.(I also suspect that O'reilly's over the top assertion that terrorist = Muslim is a compensatory mechanism, conscious or unconscious I do not know.)

The logical explanation for the way the security response is playing out in the field of travel seems to be that people are afraid of unfamiliar people and all it takes to tone down that fear is just some superficial familiarity (such as skin tone).

So I am hopeful that this stage too will pass. Sooner the better, and I hope with no permanent scars.

Re: How Israel handles airport security

#163

Post by berntb »

darklajid wrote: post #161
shin_lao wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are just one data point.

That's only true in this very limited set here. Add me as a second one: I'm white, male, as uninteresting as it can get (heh..). A little geeky perhaps, but I'm > 30 and every now and then have to prove that I'm > 18 for purchases or contracts. You know - the "Ohhh, you are really an adolescent?" type of guy. I shave every ~2 weeks and you probably cannot tell if I'm one week into the routine if we meet. Still: Every…

That security system is obviously designed with an acceptance of quite a few false positives. (Are you a political extremist?)

Maybe harassing you is white noise? (Pun mostly intended.) That is, to throw off attempts to analyze the security?

Re: How Israel handles airport security

#164

Post by d2viant »

maxawaytoolong wrote: post #143
philwelch wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IDF is more specialized in counterterrorism than the US military, but that's because counterterrorism is 70-80% of the IDF's mission--the other 20-30% being defense against comparatively feeble Arab armies. The IDF also only has to defend itself. The US military has much, much wider requirements--it has obligations to South Korea, Japan, NATO, and the entire Western hemisphere, which demand a strong conventional…

Check out the book "Imperial Grunts" by Robert Kaplan. The US military also has forces in Kenya, Yemen, the Philippines, Mongolia, and Columbia.

To be even more specific, the US military has a presence in over 150 countries.

Re: How Israel handles airport security

#165

Post by danielnicollet »

nosse wrote: post #119
barkingcat wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you have a real understanding of terror related topics as it applies to Israel. In an area of the world where getting ak47's is easy as heck - you can go a few countries away from Israel and buy them at open air markets - it makes a lot of sense to make sure no one is carrying guns and other weapons made with heavy metals into your airport. The security is made of layers - just because they are checking…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_metal_(chemistry) I've always though that heavy metals mean stuff like uranium and lead...

Exactly nosse! I meant "heavy metals" versus "metal". The latter makes sense. The former doesn't. I am sure you can hurt people with manganese for instance, but a gun would make more sense, no?

Re: How Israel handles airport security

#166

Post by eru »

eliben wrote: post #112
SkyMarshal wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds from the article that the Israeli airport security personal are all ex-IDF. It's a job they naturally matriculate into after serving their required 2yrs in the IDF. I am not an expert, but I imagine that given the primary mission of the IDF in dealing with Palestine, they probably receive training and some experience (depending on where they are assigned) in how to spot potential terrorists using behavioral…

3 years for men, 2 years for women. And such security jobs are more easily gained by people who served a bit longer (i.e. signed up for another year or two of paid service, after the compulsory one ended)

How do they justify the longer service for men?

Re: How Israel handles airport security

#167

Post by philwelch »

d2viant wrote: post #164
maxawaytoolong wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out the book "Imperial Grunts" by Robert Kaplan. The US military also has forces in Kenya, Yemen, the Philippines, Mongolia, and Columbia.

To be even more specific, the US military has a presence in over 150 countries.

People quote that statistic all the time. Suspiciously, the US also has over 150 embassies, and each of them is guarded by a small detachment of Marines. I wonder what the number really is when you stop counting embassy guard details.

Re: How Israel handles airport security

#168

Post by chronomex »

eru wrote: post #166
eliben wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 years for men, 2 years for women. And such security jobs are more easily gained by people who served a bit longer (i.e. signed up for another year or two of paid service, after the compulsory one ended)

How do they justify the longer service for men?

How does the US military justify the draft excluding women?
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