Stop humiliating me, traveller pleads

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10600019

"Would I had been treated better if I was blond and my last name was Smith?" - yes

"Is it because I'm a Muslim and Middle Eastern I get treated like a litterbug just because of my last name?" - yes

"Don't all those years of good conduct and service in NZ count?" - apparently not given the above.

Christ, can't people accept that who they are - their name and look will affect their treatment until the end of mankind?

Sure, it sucks. But historically, people matching his description/name etc rank high on the risk list compared to the Smiths of the world.

Move along...

why should people accept that they are being discriminated against

the real terrorists are on no airport watch list

Is he really being discriminated any more than when my sister gets her bags checked when they think she may not have declared to gifts? He's been profiled for the safety of all. Whether appropriately is a matter of opinion. Do we accept that there is a pretty good chance the customs/airport people may know more about this than us?

As for the real terrorists not being on watch lists - doesn't this give even more reason to profile people?

The I'm a citizen aspect of this is not so relevant nowdays either given the attempts globally by locals to commit terrorist acts at home.

Annoying, sure. Inconvenient, sure. Is it going to stop anytime soon? I hope the hell not.

considering the number of terror attacks on NZ... we should ban all French people from our nation and stop playing them in sport

or do we only think those the US say are terror suspects can be?

as for them not on watch lists - lets start with Bush, Blair Cheney et al - these are the real terrorists

live in fear die in fear

Does anyone actually know if Customs is allowed to access your personal property on an electronic device as part of a random check? I know they can go as far as dismantling the laptop if they believe it to contain illegal goods/material… but forcefully accessing an electronic device, which may hold a lot of personal or commercially sensitive information, is an invasion of privacy, right?

I would allow someone to frisk me and x-ray my bags etc at the airport, but if the customs officer comes up and says he’ll need to scroll through my mobile phone – I’d politely refuse. I cannot think of what purpose that would serve, save that they actually suspect me of being a criminal, and not just the fact that I may ‘possibly be a security risk’. If the matter was pressed further, I’d allow them to access my personal devices under the condition that it is supervised by my lawyer and/or they have a warrant (which I’m pretty sure they’d need). Heck, the police can’t even get you to empty your wallet unless they’ve got solid grounds to suspect that something illegal is in it.

Am I alone in thinking this? Or are Customs actually empowered to search everything, no matter how reasonable/unreasonable it may seem? If not for anything else, I’d like to know this just for personal knowledge.

Well taking the right to be free from discrimination based on your race in to account, they'd have to be a REALLY significant impact from choosing people based on race to overcome that. And there's not - there is no evidence that just selecting on race makes it more likely to catch someone. Timothy McVeigh got away originally because the cops weren't searching white folks.

That's wrong. They do it for a reason - the most common and detectable terrorists (by western standards at least) are overwhelmingly associated with certain countries, religions and races.

There are always exceptions - old people who drink and drive, white guys who are good at basketball etc etc.

I have a feeling they can. And why not? There are many illegal or items indicative of other intentions which could be kept on a lap-top.

Privacy laws pretty much don't exist when you're entering a border.. and the fact this guy uses the "I'm a NZ citizen" sort of makes the point - that is the worst reason at all to simply not check someone out.

You agree that there is a pretty base level right to non-discrimination based on race? As in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights etc etc.
And that to brush that aside would require clear and overwhelming benefit?
If so - please show me the studies that racial profiling is effective.

or any profiling for that matter

Studies? How about real life practice?
As a direct result of profiling (on religious associations/travel patterns): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8242238.stm

Racial profiling is pretty touch subject but the reality is there are certainly some trends amongst races for certain abilities, industries, skills or failings. Ditto for religions, countries of origin etc.

Absolutely, yes. I'm not advocating routine discrimination at all. But border entry is not routine - and it carries many issues which don't even cross most people's minds in their daily lives.

If checks turned up a single attempt to commit a terrorist act or even help establish a person's association with known criminals then the job is worth it. Practicality-wise you can't check everyone, everytime - so you make guesses based on whatever historical data you might have. And that data, anecdotally shows it is more efficient to single out people who are from potentially extreme religions and who travel to certain countries than doing purely random selection.

Do you think someone aged 2-5 years old is less/likely to be a risk than a 20-30 year old?

What about a 75 year old woman on her way home from Samoa compared to a 22 year old who's just been in Yemen for a year?

Doesn't take much brain-power to work it out that general profiling serves a practical purpose in many ways.

Let's say the probability of a member of Race A committing a terrorist act is 0.0001

Let's say the probability of a member of Race B committing that same act is 0.003

That's 30x higher, yet still extremely low. Thoughts?

Point being this is just a complaint about something which goes on every time you encounter another person - often in subtle ways and often in major ways.

- You see a potentially desirable girl, but she's with a guy who looks like a meat-axe. You profile her by here choice in friends.

- You see someone who is super gaunt with red eyes and bad teeth. You profile them as a drug-addict.

- You go to McDonald's and chose the queue with the person in the managers uniform. Previous experience teaches you to profile the trainee will is more likely to screw up your order.

- You apply for a job as a shop-attendant and turn up with bad breath - you're profiled as someone who may offend customers and don't get the job.

But if you go overseas often, by yourself to Syria and on return are singled out when a woman who went to Sydney with three kids isn't it is somehow some major breach of human rights? WTF?

Yes, I understand that. But to 'access' it even with you saying no, they must have some solid grounds (especially if after a physical search, they have found nothing)... something more than just your 'last name'. Who's to say that when your laptop comes back to you from customs you won’t ‘suddenly’ have a few extra files on it that happen to contain evidence of wrongdoing?

Carrying 'files' themselves isn’t actually an illegal act (unless the files themselves are illegal like child porn). But if we’re talking about ‘terrorists’ here, then you’d actually need to suspect someone of being a terrorist and expect to find evidence that will incriminate that person in his/her laptop. That’s a stretch beyond ‘random profiling’ to me.

Even the police need a warrant to access your personal devices for investigative purposes. If what you say is true, then they could technically be searching every ‘suspected’ trafficker or terrorist at the airport until kingdom comes… scan your mobile phones, go through your texts, copy over your hard drives etc etc… but that doesn’t happen, at least not to my knowledge.

I'm not convinced that Customs have unfettered access to your belongings, even in an airport terminal where it's supposedly a no-man's land. Perhaps in the US, under some Terorrist Act clause... but I still don't think they actually have that power in NZ. And I'm drawing the distinction here between the officers actually having solid grounds to suspect you of being a terrorist, a drug trafficker etc, with just a 'random profiling check'.

So, if a Customs officer told you that they wanted to access your mobile and laptop as part of a random check, RobW, you’d just give it to them without questioning their authority or basis for wanting to do so?

This is rediculous. It's happened four times now. They have got to find a way to stop wasting everybodies time with going through the same scenario over and over again ad infinitum.

Needs more intelligence, less "I'll show you who's boss around here Abdullah."

RaAttempts to rationally justify racial profiling dont hold up in the slightest when we have huge numbers of Arabic and Islamic people in NZ, but are yet to identify any terrorists, or even the real threat of terrorism in our country.

It's not too far from the rubbish that lead the USA to intervene in Iraq, but that obviously isn't enough to deter some people from exercising their reptilian instincts against those identified as outsiders.

Rob stop watching fox news - you sound like one of their talking heads

A good question Vads - to me this is why racial profiling shouldn't happen.
Random variation and standard deviations would SWAMP that small a difference and it wuold therefore be statistically insignificant.

So utilising a method that directly breaches constitutional law for no real gain? No thanks.
I will add your only way of measuring "probability of crime" by race is based on arrests and convictions - which in itself is skewed by the fact that racial profiling occurs

You'd be interested in this methinks: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/02/study-racial-profiling-no-more-effective-than-random-screen.ars
Non-judgemental, pure mathematical analysis of the effectiveness of racial profiling. Short story: it ain't

LOL, you pulled a vadz and posted something you thought I wouldn't read

That article is definitely not an indictment of racial profiling. It's a purely model-based criticism of racial profiling with ZERO experimental data to prove/disprove it. Rutherford would be disgusted. Even Einstein had to measure light curving around the sun.

We profile all the time. Say I am a British soldier in Normandy in 1944. I see someone come towards me in a German uniform. I "profile" him as a German, and thus a threat. There's no "scientific proof" he's a German soldier, but the uniform, gun etc are rather indiactive. So it all becomes a question of quantity, not quality; how much data is required for profiling to occur?

And, sure, there is bias in some things, but you have to deal with what you have. If a survey of drug users indicates that european males 18-23 are the primary drug users, do you blame police for profiling those guys for random chats on K rd? or do you atack the initial survey for being potentially imbalanced due to a lack of returns from blacks or females?

If you want 'scientific' proof for every type of policy, you will never get ANYTHING done. It's that simple

If I've ever watched Fox is was in error and only for a matter of seconds.

Sounds like you're applying the logic of normal policing/law-enforecement to something which is distinctly different - border security. Police have skin colour to go on. Border security have that, and your name and any name changes, plus travel habits, who you travel with, any criminal convictions, any previously refused visas etc etc right there in front of them while you are at the desk.

Now, if you set aside the race of a person and their name and just look at their travel habits alone you can significantly assess the risk of a person being dodgy to a degree hundreds of times more (if not more) than using random selection.

Pandering to someone's gripes that they're being called out for my race/name when their travel habits alone seem odd is just being silly and showing a pretty dormitive view of the situation.

Here's give an example from personal experience.

I travel a lot. One year, 2007 I think, I went to Thailand three times in six months. Once for a planned trip, once because I had a few days to kill when I was in Singapore and another two nighter on the way back from somewhere else.

Guess what? When I arrived back in NZ, I got profiled for my travel habits - they even told me so. They asked me questions about my trips, the reasons - where I stayed, was I meeting anyone there etc. Since I was on a plane all night I suspect I half-dozed during it. (ironically, the person who questioned me - a NZ citizen - was so difficult to understand I almost had to ask for a translator). Obviously, the implication is people who travel to said places often are a significantly higher risk of being drug runners or whatever.

Point being - don't kick up a shit when they ask you about it. If you go to Syria or Pakistan and are sketchty or evasive when they ask you questions expect it to happen next time.

Re: the NZ Herald article, if you spoke to the people at the airport about this guy would probably paint a very different picture about his demeanour, attitude etc. I like to give them a bit of credit that they know a bit about their job - moreso than anyone here looking at it with their convenient rose-tinted view on it all.

I'm not concerned with whether the dude cried about it or not.

I still want to know, if a Customs officer comes up to me and say, "Mate, hand over your mobile phone and laptop, we'd like to run through the files and your address book"... do I have a right to say "No, thank you" and have that right enforced, or do I not?

Again, I'm making the distinction here that it happens in the context of what is to me, at the time, a random check. I'm sure that some checks are done with valid reasons like dodgy travel habits or maybe just a dodgy record or observed behaviour... but random checks do happen... In fact, I was checked twice a few weeks ago upon departure and arrival, and officers at both ends told me it was a 'random pullover'. They didn't ask to access my phone, but if they did, then would I have a right to refuse or would it be futile?

Dunno. I imagine a few other hurdles would have been passed before it got to that though including their assessment that you're acting evasively or suspiciously somehow.

Remember they often watch people for the entire walk from the plane to the counter before they make the call to speak to you further. The airport has an entire crew on the cameras checking the habits of people as they come off a plane. It's not just the person at the counter not liking your vibe.

many of those shop lifting detectors have remotes that a security guard can set off if they wish so they can check your bags.

I've been randomly searched at customs around the world a few times, nothing too intrusive but i didnt bitch about it. A friend of mine's dad has a drug conviction and every time he travels he gets searched.