Comments on: Sam Harris is Right: Profile away!

By: Richard Dawkins, ‘Islamophobia’ and the atheist movement | Islamophobia Today eNewspaper

Tue, 07 May 2013 15:49:06 +0000

[…] not going to bother tackling the merits and demerits of this when they’ve been covered so well by others. Suffice it to say that in my lifetime white Christians have been consistently the […]

By: ‘Islamophobia’ and the Atheist movement | Holes In the Foam...

‘Islamophobia’ and the Atheist movement | Holes In the Foam... — Sat, 04 May 2013 20:12:11 +0000

[…] not going to bother tackling the merits and demerits of this when they’ve been covered so wellby others. Suffice it to say that in my lifetime white Christians have been consistently the […]

By: acrisisoffaiththebook

acrisisoffaiththebook — Tue, 08 May 2012 02:03:52 +0000

Great article!

By: sailor

sailor — Fri, 04 May 2012 01:36:17 +0000

In a small town we had a serial arsonist, who kept burning down people’s camps when they were empty. The gurus got onto profiling and were sure it was a white male with some kind of police/authority linked background. Turned out to be a woman. What did work in this case was not profiling, but locating the suspect on the basis of the location of all the fires.

By: Tim Groc

Tim Groc — Fri, 04 May 2012 01:35:45 +0000

RW Ahrens says:
May 1, 2012 at 5:49 pm

I thought immediately of the Israeli techniques as soon as I began reading Harris’ piece. Profiling, as you note, if done properly, and for the right things, can be very successful. the Israelis are experts at it.

But the Israelis do use racial profiling.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 03 May 2012 15:34:09 +0000

Charles, none of that information jives with the Wikipedia article on Pan Am 103. You better go make the appropriate changes in Wikipedea.

By: StevoR

StevoR — Thu, 03 May 2012 14:09:17 +0000

Makes one think.

By: Charles Norrie

Charles Norrie — Thu, 03 May 2012 12:48:17 +0000

This is vomplete nonsense. No young white woman carried a suitcase rgat blew up Pan Am 103 even in the official story, which is a complete lie.

The first device was attached to AVE40412 Pa by an Iranian with the name of Ahmadi Beladi Behbehani, now dead. The second was carried on by Captian Joseph Patrick Curry of the US special forces who had been given the device by Parviz Tahiri at Franfurt Arport. Tahiri was an Iranian Kurd

By: M. A. Melby

M. A. Melby — Wed, 02 May 2012 20:46:11 +0000

Realize that Sam Harris isn’t even advocating for sophisticated profiling or targeting techniques – that is a real discussion. However, the model-based evidence suggests (I linked a couple studies on my blog) that even those types of techniques tend to waste resources on constantly scrutinizing the same innocent people and are not much better than randomization.

He instead, insists that we should never scrutinized the very young or very old and target, specifically, people who dress in traditional Muslim dress as well as anyone who “looks Muslim” (whatever the heck that means). He doesn’t advocate that people be flagged due to some complex aggregate of specific criminal/terrorist-typical behaviors; but that TSA agents should instinctively know “at a glance” who they should target.

The only way to make his stance the least bit defensible is to completely re-frame it.

By: Stephanie Zvan

Stephanie Zvan — Wed, 02 May 2012 16:51:03 +0000

blot, sharing that information could be useful–if there were enough terrorist incidents from which to generalize. If there are not, and I’ve yet to see anyone make a good case that there are, the only thing accomplished is invasion of privacy.