German airport official calls for passenger profiling

2010-12-30 05:41:09 GMT+7 (ICT)

BERLIN, GERMANY (BNO NEWS) -- Christoph Blume, the CEO of Dusseldorf airport, on Wednesday called for introducing passenger profiling in German airports to combat terrorism, Deutsch Welle television reported.

Blume, the future President of the German Airport Association (ADV) said he want to introduce the system that would be based on age, sex and ethnicity for high-risk passengers. The profiling system would be similar to one used in Israel.

German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger rejected Blume’s idea and warned of the danger of stigmatizing people based on their appearance, origin or religion. She added that the profiling system would be against German and European anti-discrimination legislation.

Blume, who will become ADV president in Janaury, defended his proposal by saying that with profiling passengers, security systems can be more effective and will benefit everybody. Passengers that are deemed more likely to be terrorists would undergo tighter security checks ranging from bag examinations to full body searches.

Joerg Handwerg, a pilot and spokesman for the pilot’s association Cockpit, agreed with Blume’s proposal. The Lufthansa pilot said that the current controls are highly ineffective and only waste valuable resources. He added that passenger profiling was a matter of common sense and not discriminatory.

"The Israelis already very successfully do psychological profiling based on asking people where they are going and paying attention to psychological reactions, like if the people become nervous," Handwerg said. "In these conversations you can assess whether a passenger should be checked more closely, or if they are unsuspicious."

Critics to passenger profiling said that this issue represented a problem both legally and socially. In Germany, ethnic discrimination is not allowed in the Constitution and its population is conformed by a large amount of immigrant citizens, mainly from Africa and Turkey.

Federal Commissioner for data protection, Peter Schaar, also opposed the proposal of the next ADV head. He said that the measure was unreasonable and unsupported in any legal sense. He added that passenger profiling would also cause permanent social damage.

-- © BNO News All rights reserved 2010-12-30

How about considering a trial period? Germany 2011 is not Germany circa 1932.

It is truly amazing that this is not already being experimented with widely. Systematic profiling to make flying safer and more convenient has nothing to do with racism. It is a helpful tool that might make the airplanes a more secure.

Edited December 30, 201015 yr by Ulysses G.