Originally posted by TrashMan
Wow..I just figured your tactic. Burry someone with so many questions that he will have to spend hours writing responses to them and will prolyl loose the will to write anything.
If he doesn't respond then it will look like he's avoiding or not knowing the answers..
Very sneaky.
As for your questions - look in the dictionary or wikipedia - that's what they are for.
So you
can't answer them or illustrate any way in which they would assist or improve the investigationary process?
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And just one thing before I leave this thread for good ( arguing with people I don't know over the internet in a endless debate does not appeal to me. I have better things to do with my time )
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If you can't come up with answers, just admit it. We won't laught at you or anything for it, there's no shame acknowledging when you don't know something. It's how we learn.
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Normal police method - someone robs a bank/kills someone. Police comes, gathers evidence and try to find the crrok. Works, but not allways.
In the case of a suicide bomber - he guy is dead. If you find out wo he was you can't question him. You can try seraching his hme, investigating his frieds, etc,, etc..
Best case scenario - you might find someone he worked with but the damage has allready been done, many are dead. And you'll probably locate just 1 cell anyway. And since the cells know nothing about eachother, you're stuck.
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That's incorrect. Police method involves gathering evidence of the planning of a crime; with regards to terrorism it also involves the services of the intelligence services and the gathering of information from communications or agents within
known extremist groups.
In the case of a suicide bomber specifically, we actually have an illustration of why this doesn't work; one of the 7/7 bombers was examined by MI5 and cleared of being a threat prior to blowing himself up. In this case he was identified by association, but there's not really any difference in the investigation process compared to whether he had been identified by profile (had he been identified as such, then there'd be even less evidence supporting the initial investigation).
In fact, all the London bombers (both 7/7 and 21/7) have been described as perfectly normal, westernised individuals by people who knew them (same also for the Madrid bombers IIRC) - there's no evidence that identifying them via profile would have highligthed them. It's highly unlikely, in fact, because any profile big enough to encompass such an ethnically (and demographically) diverse group of individuals would encapsulate such a massive group of people as to make invasive surveillance impossible due to time and power constraints of checking each and evey individual matching the profile. You seem to be making the assumption that it's easy to identify a terrorist by 'looking' (i.e. surface level investigation) at them, but that's simply not true as evidenced by the example in the previous paragraph.
Now, I'll give a real 'best case scenario' for current investigation methods.
(note; this is for an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist; I'll ignore the very obvious examples of other terrorists being stopped by police, such as ETA, IRA or November 17 arrests)
Agent X of MI5 identifies a known extremistpreacher 'A' (MI6 if said person is abroad). This identification is based upon using evidence - reports of extremist recruitment from concerned individuals - and thus the granting of legalising court documents (supplied due to supporting evidence) allowing investigation.
This point is less likely to be reached under profiling due to the time and cost constraints of investigating individuals as previously mentioned; in that case it may be that said individual is placed on a risk assessment pile for later investigation once they've completed going through the whole profile of, say, 500,000 people. Using intelligence tools, MI5 gain access to the Mosque which A preaches at. Surveilliance devices are planted, or an undercover agent used. This agent observes close contact between A and another individual B.
Now, this in itself represents a bending of the rules in the sense that there's probably a bit of a lack of proof at this point - this is still however more evidence than possible to identify under profiling a large (massive) populationB is thus investigated; now the communications made by both A and B are being intercepted under warrant. M15 is probably co-ordinating with Special Branch at this point. This communication leads them to a group of individuals; say C,D,E and F. These 4 are now part of the surveillance operation.
C,D,E and F are observed buying fertiliser (or some other material useable for a bomb or terrorist device), or perhaps are seen meeting with another suspect. With this evidence, a warrant can be given to raid the premises. Special Branch & SO19 raid the premises, arrest the individuals and uncover evidence of a planned terrorist attack. Furthermore, there is now evidence that can be used to identify suspicious individuals (including illegal immigrants not known to be in the country, or suspicious individuals who entered the country under false ID), and prosecute them.
end result; one cell disrupted and captured, and a clearer idea of their recruitment process plus other suspects identified during the investigation.
you'll notice this outcome is not different from the best case profiling, where magically there are infinite officers to check out 100,000s or millions of suspects in no time atall, and somehow already have obtained the records they need to even match individuals to profiles (which incidentally means getting personal information from every individual in the country)
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When doing profiling you're investigating people who are most likely to be involved with (or are) terrorist. Standard police methoids apply here. you check the suspect and if you find nothing you move on to the next one. Slow method and requires a lot of work, but you can get to the terrorist BEFORE the damage is done and you are targeting all cells at the same time.[/q]
How many hundred thosuand million 'suspects' does your profile create? You've not even explained how you'll take a population of millions and identify terrorists from it, nor what you'll do once you've completed your profile and actually managed to mine enough data to match individuals (using methods that usually require court orders due to their invasiveness - good luck getting 2 million search warrants on the basis of ethnicity or age alone)
I'm sure it's very effective to perform invasive surveillance on millions of people in an orwellian society with infinite resources and no human rights, but not in a real democratic country with what is known as an 'economy'.
Not to mention that sort of thing also tends to breed extremism by the inherent prejudice in the system.
You can prevent something like 9/11 happening. With normal police methods you can only act after it.
Note that thise doesn't exclude eachtoher, as normal police methoids are still use in profiling. And the government has more than enough resources to hire more personall if needed.
That's complete rubbish. Are you implying the police have never prevented the commission of a crime? what exactly do you think, for example, undercover officers do?
your suggestion is to hire thousands of extra officers for the purpose of profiling a population (i.e. investigating the senstivie personal information protected under privacy and civil/human rights law), when basic statistics tells you the vast majority (over 99%) of those suspects will be innocent and thus not worthy of police time.
In gathering this information, you not only breach human rights (because you can't get private information legally without some form of evidence of misdeed), but take all these thousands of officers and put them on a task where you know their time is wasted.
Furthermore, you remove all these excess officers (apparently a government has infinite resources to pay for these... strange, that) from being in a position to investigate suspects outside your profile (and there are - just see the London bombs.. or even white terrorists with a different cause). That is, suspects who might have actual evidence against them (y'know, the kind gathered in normal police work).
