Profiling and Israeli security

FiveThirtyEight (Sept. 28) -- On several occasions, the Republican presidential nominee has suggested that law-enforcement agencies should consider profiling as part of their counterterrorism plans. Security experts distinguish profiling in general — which is based on behavior that’s been displayed by terrorists in the past — from demographics-based profiling and say that the former is inescapable in security. “The concept of profiling, in its root form, is using past information to predict future performance,” said Sheldon Jacobson, who is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has researched aviation security.