A More Rational Approach for Targeting Terror Suspects
I talked to UCLA law professor Mark Kleiman about the application of his ideas about crime-fighting to the aviation security problem in my latest column for The Week.
I called Kleiman this week to pose a question: If targeting suspects in this way is the secret to better policing, is it also the secret to better aviation security? For example, what if you invited travelers to fill out a form providing information that is valuable for targeting but ethnicity-neutral? For example:
How long have they lived at their present address?
How long have they worked at their present job?
How many flights have they completed over the past two years?
How old are they?
Do they have children?
Do they have an honorable discharge from the military?
Answers to questions like these could be used to develop a risk profile of each traveler. Travelers could then be sorted into grades, with the least risky among them subject to the lightest search. (If you are looking for a needle in a haystack, the first step is to get rid of as much hay as you can.)