Nope. But I know how to read, do you?

http://www.todayszaman.com/new...

If you are the security guard at a Pfizer animal testing facility, you probably wouldn't look twice at the 2 Muslim guys who recently got hired, but the hippy-looking chick with the angry boyfriend? Yeah you're following them on the security cameras.

Profiling. It makes sense. It actually makes more sense the more specific the target you're looking for. Your error is lumping all terrorists in as one group, which is silly. The terrorists who attack tax buildings are completely different from the terrorists who want complete independence for Puerto Rico and still different from the terrorists who want to impose sharia law everywhere... etc.

Each of those groups is easy to profile. Lumping them all together serves no purpose except to cloud the issue. Are you doing that on purpose?

And that plane will rightfully have greater scrutiny than others.

Haven't you seen the polls in the last decade about how many "perfectly regular" Muslims actually support or sympathize with terrorists? Sure, virtually all Muslims are not terrorists. But with limited resources to investigate and stop terrorists, it makes sense to concentrate on populations where they're likely to have connections. That's why the FBI and police forces are infiltrating mosques... not because "all Muslims must be terrorists" but because the one-in-a-million Muslim terrorist in Toronto is probably going to one of a handful of mosques that the police know about with radical clerics and frequent trips and communications with foreign Muslim groups. And around that one-in-a-million terrorist, there's a network of 100 people who know him and pretty much support what he's doing even though they wouldn't do it themselves, and many of them are undoubtedly at the more radical mosques as well.

So if 3 of those guys gets on the same plane with a 4th guy who is not even on the radar but looks really radical, maybe we should check them all out thoroughly. Who cares if they're inconvenienced?

Well, if your name phonetically matches a known Muslim terrorist and you are a Muslim, then you need to be pretty heavily scrutinized whenever you travel.

If your name phonetically matches a known Muslim terrorist, but you are a 70 year old Mexican grandma, then you do not need to be heavily scrutinized whenever you travel.

That's how profiling helps. We know more about terrorists than their name -- we know physical and cultural characteristics. If we have that extra information about passengers as well, then it can be used to dramatically reduce false positives.

That would be a problem if US airport security somehow was based in the Middle East, but it's not.

Pretty much every country on Earth subjects foreigners to increased scrutiny. It's common sense.

That's unlikely.. there are already stupid things like not being allowed to bring shampoo on the plane. Border agents are not ignoring that stuff, and it's a lot less stupid to profile young Muslim men than to profile "everybody carrying more than 3oz of fluid" etc.

So less than 1%.

Cat Stevens changed his name to Yusuf Islam.

No you don't have to blindly agree, nor agree to everything. Blaming the GOP for 9/11 is really dumb though. Are you seriously defending that argument?

What if you're a devout Muslim who believes Twitter should be blocked since it's a tool of Western agents to defame and slander your leader, a true lion of Islam, who wants to restore the caliphate?

Yeah, there are more people like that in Turkey than people like you...

Hi anon, you are an idiot.

You better alert states like New Hampshire, which don't require you to wear a seatbelt.

Bunkering up at home is not the only alternative to vaccination. How about, for instance, breast feeding your baby so that the baby has the advantage of the mother's immunities before he can be vaccinated himself? Should that be a legal requirement since it's a pretty reasonable thing to do? If a woman chooses not to breastfeed, should she be criminally liable if the baby gets sick?

I don't think you read the post I was responding to.

Hmm the big difference is that Mubarak suppressed Islamist groups and Erdogan works with them. Who do you think was the muscle behind the protests in Egypt? Who is going to topple Erdogan? How are they going to do against the hardcore Muslims who support Turkey's fall into Islamism? I'm reminded of the hilarious naivete of Iranian intellectuals and communists who thought that allying with radical Muslims was a great idea to get rid of the shah. "Hey we'll let the Muslims do the fighting, and then they'll let us rule over them and impose a secular system that they hate to the core! What a simple and elegant solution! I wonder why other Muslim countries didn't think of that??"

Tangential point... why do you think the Arab spring began in Egypt instead of Tunisia? Tunisia has been oddly forgotten in the last few years, not just by you but the mainstream press as well. God only knows how many times NPR has linked Tahrir Square to the start of the Arab spring.

What if it's not pure bullshit? More to the point, the danger with limiting political speech based on libel and slander is that the government decides what libel and slander is. If Country X has a law that what politicians do in private is private, and that revealing those private actions is a form of libel/slander, then do you support the ban?

How far off am I? According to CNN Erdogan said the leaked material he's apparently trying to suppress was "immorally edited." He also said "Freedom is not invading someone's privacy."

What I don't get is why anyone outside of Turkey gives a crap if they block twitter. I get that some people are sad to see this so-called Islamic democracy turning into a failed state, but that's been going on for years. Twitter was the final straw?? Okay..

Looser name matching would increase false positives, but profiling would probably balance that out. Of course that would entail further invasion of privacy etc. If the authorities do it correctly, it would be pretty minor though. You have nothing to fear unless you start going to a mosque, etc.

I know you're just being funny, but terrorists don't have a goal of inconveniencing people, or interpreted loosely, throwing wrenches in the system. They are proud of who they are, what their ideology is, and they want to fight battles and win and be remembered for it.

The more hardcore the name, the cooler. Remember "Johnny Taliban?" Aka John Walker Lindh. He had a great undercover name. But he wanted to sound more authentic so he became Sulayman al-Faris.

While you are raising valid concerns about algorithms like soundex, aren't they minor concerns? Yeah there could be a typo in the name. But in the case we're talking about, it wasn't a typo, it was an alternate phonetic spelling.

And regarding false positives, luckily there aren't many terrorists today named John Smith. False positives would be restricted to relatively small populations anyway, like Muslims and non-Western names. How many "bin laden/bin ladin/bin ladan/ben laden/etc" names are there in the US? Maybe a few, who would all be false positives. So? That's still tiny.

The other thing you're ignoring is that name matching is just part of identity verification. I find it unlikely that Russia gave us this name and nothing else. There was probably a picture as well, or a description. Some percentage of false positives would be eliminated on that basis. "Oh this guy is 80, we're looking for a teenager. Next."

That's a bad way to evaluate the false positive rate because it assumes the distribution of terrorist names is the same as the distribution of names in Social Security. In reality there aren't many Muslims in the US, so the false positive rate for the general population would be much lower. (It may be high for Muslims though, especially since from what I recall soundex etc aren't really optimized for non-Western names.)

Not to mention, name matching is just step one of identification. I'm assuming there's also a picture that would pop up. If the person in front of you is an 80 year old man and the picture is a 17 old year kid, the security agent doesn't have to even mention it.