AIRPORT SECURITY: The Case for Discrimination - Brief Article

National Review, July 1, 2002

Edgardo Cureg was about to catch a Continental Airlines flight home on New Year's Eve when he ran into a former professor of his. Cureg lent the professor his cell phone and, once on board, went to the professor's seat to retrieve it. Another passenger saw the two "brown- skinned men" (Cureg is of Filipino descent, the professor Sri Lankan) conferring and became alarmed that they, and another man, were "behaving suspiciously." The three men were taken off the plane and forced to get later flights. The incident is now the subject of a lawsuit by the ACLU.

Several features of Cureg's story are worth noting. First, he was treated unfairly, in that he was embarrassed and inconvenienced because he was wrongly suspected of being a terrorist. Second, he was not treated unfairly, because he was not wrongly suspected. A fellow passenger, taking account of his apparent ethnicity, his sex and age, and his behavior, could reasonably come to the conclusion that he was suspicious. Third, passengers' anxieties, and their inclination to take security matters into their own hands, increase when they have good reason to worry that the authorities are not taking all reasonable steps to look into suspicious characters themselves. If airport screeners do not profile passengers with characteristics similar to those of the terrorists who attacked us -- if, as seems to be the case, they go so far in the other direction as to subject people who do not have those characteristics to greater scrutiny -- then the passengers will do some profiling on their own.

Racial profiling of passengers at check-in is not, of course, a panacea. John Walker Lindh could have a ticket; a weapon could be planted on an unwitting 73-year-old nun. But profiling is a way of allocating sufficiently the resources devoted to security. A security system has to, yes, discriminate -- among levels of threat.

Profiling is not the only way that differential treatment of passengers could improve the efficiency of airline security. Why not create a two- tier system, in which passengers who are willing to provide more information to the screeners (carrying a biometric identifier, say) could pass through security more quickly? Such a system would not be foolproof, of course. But it would reduce the inconvenience for frequent flyers -- for everyone, actually -- while respecting the sensibilities of those travelers who are loath to give up more privacy.

Since September 11, we have heard a lot about the trade-offs, real and imagined, between liberty and security. But the current airport security arrangements achieve neither. They are intrusive without being reassuring. Surely we can do better.