Does profiling work?

SLATE'S Brian Palmer has an interesting article on Israeli airport security. Here's what he concludes:

What makes Israeli airport security so great?

Profiling.

As Mr Palmer points out, the Israelis don't pretend they treat all sorts of passengers equally. "Ethnicity," Mr Palmer says, "is probably a consideration." Don't doubt itthere's little question that the Jewish state considers ethnic background when it screens airline passengers. America's Transportation Security Administration says it does not. But as Mr Palmer points out, it's the Israelis, not the Americans, who can actually point to a demonstrated airport security victory: they've caught a potential terrorist in the act:

When the girlfriend of Jordanian terrorist Nizar Hindawi tried to carry a bomb onto an El Al flight out of London's Heathrow airport in 1986, security agents working for the Israeli airline and using Israeli screening methods successfully identified her as a potential threat and foiled the plot.

That's fairly impressive. But Mr Palmer's explainer neglects to mention a few key points. First, Israel only has one medium-sized international airport. It would be hard to scale up their expensive, in-depth security processes to a nation the size of the US.

Second, Israeli airport security isn't restricted by the US Constitution. Even the Bush administration was absolutely confident racial profiling was illegal: in 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft described it as "unconstitutional" and said that Mr Bush believed it was "wrong." Nor does Israel have to deal with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Finally, Israel's sample size is much smaller. The TSA, for all its faults, has overseen security screening for many times more safe flights than the Israelis have. Just because the Israelis have caught a terrorist "red-handed" doesn't mean that their system would work better for other countries than the current one.