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Bruce Schneier writes today on ‘hinkiness’, specifically on the security benefits of looking out for ‘hinky’, or ‘not right’ behavior, rather than screening for weapons, bombs, etc. El Al famously screens passengers for hinkiness, while the US TSA takes the bomb-screening approach.
Schneier is and has always been in favor of hinkiness-screening, and I think he’s right. To paraphrase the NRA: bombs don’t kill people; bombs in the control of hinky people kill people.
Nevertheless, I think that Schenier gets it wrong today. Based on what he’s written, I think that Schenier is a political liberal, and that this is coloring his judgement. He writes:
Here’s a story that illustrates this: Last week, a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology was arrested with two illegal assault weapons and 320 rounds of ammunition in his dorm room and car:
“The discovery of the weapons was made only by chance. A conference center worker who served in the military was walking past Hackenburg’s dorm room. The door was shut, but the worker heard the all-too-familiar racking sound of a weapon, said the center’s director Bill Gunther.”
Notice how expertise made the difference. The “conference center worker” had the right knowledge to recognize the sound and to understood that it was out of place in the environment he heard it.
The original article that Scheneier quotes mentions that “it is illegal to possess assault rifles and keep them on campus” at RIT. It doesn’t say anything about non-’assault’ rifles, but it’s probably safe to assume that they are forbidden in the dorms as well.
But Schneier goes on to say:
He [the conference center worker] wasn’t primed to be on the lookout for suspicious people and things; his trained awareness kicked in automatically. He recognized hinky, and he acted on that recognition. A random person simply can’t do that; he won’t recognize hinky when he sees it. He’ll report imams for praying, a neighbor he’s pissed at, or people at random. He’ll see an English professor for recycling paper, and report a Middle-Eastern-looking man leaving a box on sidewalk.
Where I think he really goes off the rails is where he makes reference to the praying imams, and to the English professor.
First, the imams: this is about a group of six imams who were thrown off a US Airways flight in Minneapolis last November. They’d been praying ‘loudly’ in the terminal before the flight, but the Washington Post reports:
Police and airline officials say the imams, who attended a national conference of Muslim clerics, were removed after exhibiting suspicious behavior, including uttering anti-American statements, changing their seat assignments so that they would be scattered around the airplane and asking for seat-belt extenders, which could be used as weapons. Valerie Wunder, a spokeswoman for US Airways, said yesterday that the airline has completed its investigation of the incident and has concluded that the flight crew was justified in its actions.
And the English professor. First, it’s important to note that this guy is a professor of English named Kazim Ali. On April 19, he was observed taking a heavy box out of his car, carrying across the street, and leaving it next to a trash can at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.
He was observed doing this by an ROTC cadet, who reported this to the police. It might be worth noting that this was three days after the shootings at Virginia Tech, and that the general level of paranoia might have been a little higher than normal.
Ali puts this all down to ‘racism’, of course, and the ignorance of the ROTC cadet. He says:
That man in the parking lot didn’t even see me. He saw my darkness. He saw my Middle Eastern descent. This is ironic because though my grandfathers came from Egypt, I am Indian, a South Asian, and could never be mistaken for a Middle Eastern man by anyone who had ever met one.
This is pretty confusing. He might be using the term ‘grandfathers’ metaphorically to mean his ancestors in general — because if both of his actual grandfathers were from Egypt, that would make him cumulatively half Egyptian, which is reasonably if not precisely Middle-Eastern.
So: three days after what can really only be called a terrorist attack at a university a few hundred miles away, a young Indian/Egyptian/Born-in-London/American guy is seen getting out of a car with out-of-state license plates. He carrys a heavy box across the street and leaves it on the sidewalk.
An ROTC cadet observer calls the cops.
This is used by Schneier as an example of a ‘random person’ reporting a ‘foreigner whose customs are different’ and of ‘profiling’, rather than as an observer reporting ‘hinky’ activities.
A number of passengers and airline crew members reporting what by all accounts I’ve read is extremely suspicious behavior on the part of a number of ostentatiously Muslim men on an airplane is also just down to racism and a lack of training, apparently.
But a ‘conference center worker’ hearing a suspicious sound through a door is to be praised for calling the cops. Schneier does not mention that the student in question is apparently a licensed gun dealer in New Jersey, where he legally bought the guns in question.
Hackenburg [the gun guy] was one of several RIT students who came to the Rochester Brooks Gun Club to shoot. The owner tells us the kids were well behaved and even took safety classes to make sure they could shoot properly. The owner tells us he doesn’t know if Hackenburg used those assault rifles at the club but says if the guns aren’t allowed in NYS, they can’t be used at the club either.
“He took really good care that we were always safe when we went out shooting,” said [Hackenburg's friend James] Ko.
Which suggests that these sounds at RIT were not in fact a sign of anything dangerous. Illegal, yes, but apparently not threatening.
So Schneier uses this — the detection of a weapon where it shouldn’t be — as an example of looking for strange behavior as opposed to just looking for weapons; while reporting Muslims praying on an airplane and asking to be supplied with what are essentially flails, or abandoning heavy boxes on sidewalks, is just racism.
The real shame is the Schneier is right in that looking for odd behavior is a much better strategy than looking for weapons. In this case, though, he’s perfectly willing to dismiss extremely odd behavior if the people behaving oddly happen to be members of a certain ethno-religious group.
