"Profiling is a hot-button issue—civil liberties groups maintain that making assumptions based on race, nationality or ethnicity is unacceptably discriminatory, whereas some prominent conservatives argue that the method is an effective means to combat crime and terrorism, and therefore worth the social cost.
So who's right?
According to new research, it is no more effective to profile strongly—that is, subject individuals to increased scrutiny in proportion to their presumed likelihood of malfeasance—than it is to randomly flag individuals in the general population when it comes to rooting out terrorism. The reason, says study author William Press, a computer scientist and computational biologist at the University of Texas at Austin: terrorists are vastly outnumbered by innocents, and it's a waste of time and money to screen and rescreen the same benign people."
More at link!
So who's right?
According to new research, it is no more effective to profile strongly—that is, subject individuals to increased scrutiny in proportion to their presumed likelihood of malfeasance—than it is to randomly flag individuals in the general population when it comes to rooting out terrorism. The reason, says study author William Press, a computer scientist and computational biologist at the University of Texas at Austin: terrorists are vastly outnumbered by innocents, and it's a waste of time and money to screen and rescreen the same benign people."
More at link!