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> Ah yes, the good ol' You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.”

You haven't got a shred of evidence of malicious intent, so you just toss around accusations of racist conspiracies. That's insane and shameful.

(I happen to think the TSA is misguided and unnecessary, but that's irrelevant to the question of discrimination.)

> If you build discrimination into the system you don't have to explicitly discriminate

There's a problem with people smuggling dangerous items on to aircraft, and the system is trying to address that to prevent people of all races dying.

The system has to find things that are hidden, and that means it has to discern between people who have more places to hide items on their body.

That design of the system is a natural consequence of the parameters of the problem, not some vast conspiracy to oppress minorities.

You are accidentally correct in saying that there is no conspiracy to oppress minorities. Conspiracy implies that it's hidden. It isn't.

We have mountains of malicious intent established and chronicled to the point where the burden of proof is not on those downstream of that malice to substantiate it. That mountain is conveniently labeled "American policing and jurisprudence relating thereto, 1620-Present".

> There's a problem with people smuggling dangerous items on to aircraft

That problem is a vanishingly small rounding error and the good-faith effort to fix it would be more air marshals. Instead, we get nonsense like this which, because the scanning devices look scary and dehumanize those who go through them, entrench a threat in the minds of the populace--because a threat must be serious, otherwise why would we be putting ourselves through all this?

These tools exist to scare people into seeking solutions to the problem they purport to, and yet do not, solve.

While we can see people disagree if this is discrimination or not, everyone agree that the system employed by the TSA is ineffective, humiliating and security theater. Air marshals are better. Dog patrols are great.

Only in areas which is very close to war would current methods be necessary, but you also need multiple checks which manually going through every single item in luggage and backpacks. This is only really possible in low traffic airports, which destinations close to wars usually is.

> There's a problem with people smuggling dangerous items on to aircraft

We have a lot of evidence that these machines are minimally effective against most terrorist threats.

How many terrorist incidents has TSA credibly prevented? The answer is zero.

How can you count events that never happened? Especially if they were deterred from even being attempted by the existence of TSA alone.

Do you think a government agency would just publicly blast all the unsuccessful attempts that were prevented, without fear that future criminals can look at those attempts and do better next time by learning how to avoid making the same mistakes?

Disclaimer: I agree with most of the posters that TSA is mostly just a security theater. But just because I think so, that doesn't make the flawed parent argument any better.

There's a gulf between publishing some basic statistics and blasting the specific details of all unsuccessful terrorist attacks that were thwarted.

Surely those statistics can be verified by, say, the House Committee on Homeland Security without needing to leak the details of specific attempts.

So can we agree that the system (which I'm taking to mean the combination of tech, people and procedure) is doing a really shit job then, because, beyond not doing what it's supposed to do, it's disproportionately singling out certain races?

Perhaps if it's singling out dense hair vs. actual places where people are hiding something, despite any evidence being presented that it's useful to do so, we should... I dunno, not use it? Definitely not spend millions of dollars on it.

I'm not sure what problem it's solving, when the solution involves humans mindlessly following a procedure, that dictates that a machine that happens to single out black hair and 'turbans' decides someone is suspect.

It's not "the machine". It's that people have genuinely variable ability to conceal dangerous items. You have to check the wheelchair of people who come in on a wheelchair, and you don't if they don't have one. That could be seen as unfair to the handicapped, but not checking the wheelchair isn't really an option.

I mean, it is an option.

The machine is one part of a hugely flawed system, and I think its totally valid to argue that we shouldn't be substituting a machine for, I dunno, actual human judgement.

The machine in this case doesn't seem to be demonstrably solving any problems, but it is disproportionately flagging black people, people with hair coverings ('turbans' in the article), etc. as suspicious, and that flagging is being used as part of a procedure to single those people out for further scrutiny. These systems don't seem to be solving any problems, and I'm not seeing a lot of defensible positions of why it should work that way, besides "eh, that's just how it is"

I don't read most of the comments here as defending the existence of the system, rather they're defending it from the accusation of deliberate malice. The system itself is deeply stupid security theatre, but was it deliberately designed to hassle black women or anyone else with dreadlocks?

Sure, and personally I'm not saying they literally set a bunch of engineers out to build a machine to explicitly target black people. I am saying that they probably didn't put the same level of testing there in that they did against disproportionately targeting white men in business suits when they were pitching investors and getting senators / the people who sign the checks to buy these things.

Or maybe they just didn't think about testing the machines against the diversity of actual people who go through an airport daily vs. who was available in the office at the time to test with.

Maybe they honestly believe that folks with natural black hairstyles, or who wear a 'turban' or ponytail, could be disproportionately hiding something suspicious up there, and we need a machine to tell us to check them out more often.

Hell, maybe they just didn't care at all who got flagged, as long as it didn't inconvenience them too much and they got paid at the end of the day. I mean they sure as shit don't mind the reality that this really does seem to be a lot of security theater with little benefit, besides the benefits to some peoples wallets.

Whether you want to define any of that as deliberate malice, willful ignorance, laziness, the banality of evil, or something else, is entirely up to your own values I suppose.

> was it deliberately designed to hassle black women or anyone else with dreadlocks?

Does it really matter when that's the end result and there is no intention or effort to fix it? Harm is harm, that the harm was intentional or not doesn't really matter when the harm is ongoing.

If your house is on fire, the first concern is to make it no be on fire, only after that does the question of intent have any relevance. And if somebody wilfully attempts to stop the process of making the house not be on fire, they should be considered intentionally harmful and no different from pyromaniacs until proven otherwise. Either way they should be removed post-haste.

How do you fix it? Program to ignore dense hair on black person and only alert is subject is white male?

Yes, clearly that is what everyone is saying. :-P

Maybe:

- Don't deploy a system that has this many false alerts (and that is what even the TSA calls them, they are not interested in finding dense hair)

- Stop continuing to use this stuff and spend money on it if we aren't seeing any benefit, and are seeing demonstrable harm.

- Don't replace human judgement with blind procedure that must be followed, when that procedure depends on a known flawed technology that isn't providing any demonstrable benefit.

- Accept that even if you want this kind of tech to exist, it isn't there yet, and you aren't going to "fix it in code" by adding a race variable.

Bottom line is, nobody is forcing us to use these machines / procedures. We aren't stuck with them and have to figure out some way to patch the code or we're all doomed, so we don't have to be so reductive about how we fix it. We could just say, this was a failed idea and throw it the hell out.

> The article is about the TSA, not Border Patrol. Looking for contraband is not the TSA's job.

You're absolutely right! Do you have a better word to describe the collection of types of items the TSA is empowered to and charged with searching for?

"Prohibited items." Not sure why this was downvoted. It is literally how the TSA refers to them on its site and answers the parent's question:

https://www.tsa.gov/travel/civil-enforcement

Save your downvotes for the TSA.

Explosives? Because the rest is BS -- e.g. toothpaste in quantities larger than 50 ml, etc...

Toothpaste tube bombs. [1]

1. https://www.thedailybeast.com/almost-everything-we-know-abou...

Thank you for divining my true intentions, sagely one. Your argument inherently invalidates any possible explanation for mechanisms that produce differing population outcomes, unless that explanation is racism. Working backwards from default explanations is textbook signifier of ideological thinking.

>Looking for contraband is not the TSA's job.

Its certainly part of their job. In states with legal Marijuana sales, there are frequently TSA drug sniffing dogs at checkpoints.