Just doesn't fly

Anti-terrorism recommendations recipe for new kind of danger

Since the TWA Flight 800 disaster, people are questioning more than ever the safety of traveling by plane.

A White House commission formed after the disaster recently recommended that a series of increased airline safety measures be implemented by the end of the year, including passenger profiling, explosive detecting equipment and bag matching.

Although these measures will surely put some airline passengers more at ease during travel, bag matching could be a recipe for discrimination.

Bag matching consists of checks to ensure that luggage from a person who is not on the plane doesn't stay on board. It sounds like a good idea that could help prevent a terrorist from concealing a bomb in luggage and then getting off the plane during a layover.

But what the commission hasn't explained is why, at first, bag matching will only be implemented for certain passengers who fit a "danger profile," and other randomly chosen passengers.

Who exactly fits into this "danger profile?"

The "danger profile" has great potential to be discriminatory to certain individuals. What will the commission's recipe for a terrorist be?

Even with the in-depth research on which the commission plans to base the "danger profile," we can only hope the profile will not be based on stereotypes. And everyone knows that a terrorist does not have to fit the profile to endanger passengers.

Hopefully, the American Civil Liberties Union will follow through on its complaint that "the proposed profiling system is invasive of privacy and likely to be discriminatory" by keeping a close eye on the commission's methods for developing profiles.

If the commission's real objective is keeping bombs off airplanes, as member Brian Michael Jenkins said, then it shouldn't limit potential terrorists to a certain "profile."

It seems the best solution would be to scrap the whole potentially-discriminatory "danger profile" idea and try to implement a system in which every piece of baggage is matched to the passenger who brings it aboard, or, at the very least, a nondiscriminatory system of random bag matching.

Otherwise, this anti-terrorist system is the profile for danger.