Smart Profiling is the answer

Smart profiling at airports will help you arrive in one piece unless you are the person hot on the trail of those 72 virgins. Good article here in the Calgary Herald by Mark Milke who is the research director for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

....Only in North America do we maintain the fiction profiling doesn't occur. But it does. In 2005, I was in Toronto for an Israel-bound flight. There were several obvious layers of security specific to the El Al check-in but the process was relatively speedy. Had I been a young male from Yemen, I'd have been asked a few extra questions and likely pulled aside.

For my flight back to Canada, at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, vehicles must stop at an outer perimeter far from the terminal building. Once through, more screening takes place, including opened luggage searched by hand with plenty of questions from young but intense security agents. I felt safer at Ben Gurion than anyone with a sense of awareness would at our airports, where we bunch up in security lineups that crawl -- perfect, slow-moving targets.

Sometimes the profiling is more obvious. In December 2008, on a Casablanca-Calgary flight with a Frankfurt connection, a police car arrived on the tarmac to inspect departing passengers.

The police were there to prevent anyone who might have dumped identification during the flight then claiming asylum. So before anyone could descend the stairs, the police first looked for and then at passports. Except that as a pale male with blue eyes and obviously not Moroccan, the German cops waved me through without even a cursory glance at my identification.

The Israeli process is intense and German screening might offend but both are efficient for everyone, profiled or not. It beats North American airports where our legitimate aspirations for social and political equality is mistakenly applied to what is in effect airport police work, and where not all approach the terminal, airplane or cockpit with equal and benign intentions........