Harris looked at what he called "hit rates" -- the percentage of stops in which the police found drugs, a gun or something else that led to an arrest -- and noted that the number of hits in general was very low for the number of stops that police made. But more interesting was that the rate for African-Americans was much lower than the rate for Caucasians. Police had a hit rate of 12.6 percent when they stopped Caucasians and only 10.5 percent when they stopped African-Americans. The hit rate for Latinos was 11.5 percent.

"You might say that we have a difference of 2.1 percent between blacks and whites. But it's actually a difference of 20 percent when you do the math right," Harris says. And "the difference between whites and Latinos is about 10 percent."

Essentially, police were stopping more African-Americans than Caucasians but finding fewer criminals among the former. Why? Not because blacks commit proportionately fewer crimes than whites do (the data vary according to the type of crime and other factors) but because police were looking at the wrong factors when they stopped people, Harris says.

"They're focusing on appearance when they should be focusing on behavior," he says. "When they're not distracted by race, they're actually doing a more accurate job" of picking out the right people.

Focusing on appearance produces a lot of false positives. And "every time you introduce a false positive, you take resources away from your ability to focus on people who are really of interest -- those who are behaving suspiciously," Harris says. "If it's a question of finding a needle in a haystack ... don't put more hay on the top."

What does work in preventing terrorism, Harris says, is behavior profiling. "If you're going to catch people who mean to put bombs on your subway trains or in airplanes, you don't actually care [if they're] young Muslim men ... You care about [keeping] anyone from boarding the airplane who is going to behave like a terrorist."

Yuval Bezherano agrees. Bezherano is the executive vice president of New Age Security Solutions, a company that teaches people how to identify behaviors that indicate a person is concealing something and could be a security risk. The technique is called behavior pattern recognition and is modeled after methods used in Israel. NASS's president, Rafi Ron, is a former security chief at Ben Gurion Airport. The company has trained authorities at Boston's Logan International Airport as well as personnel at the Statue of Liberty. Recently the company trained about 100 employees of New York's subway and bus system.

The signs to watch for can be as obvious as someone acting nervous and sweating profusely on a cold day or as subtle as someone walking awkwardly in a way that indicates the person could be wearing a belt of explosives.

"It's always the unusual, the thing that doesn't fit," Bezherano says. "If you know your environment and what is usual for the environment, you know what to look for."

Depending on the situation, the next step might be to engage the person in a targeted conversation to determine whether he or she should be elevated to a higher level of risk or cleared from consideration.

It was this kind of screening that caught Anne-Marie Murphy, who initially raised interest among El Al's security staff because she was a pregnant woman traveling a long distance alone, something that Bezherano says is unusual behavior. She'd already cleared three security checkpoints at London's Heathrow Airport before an El Al "profiler" asked her where she'd be staying in Israel. Murphy's fiancé had warned her not to tell authorities about him because they would interrogate her if they knew she had an Arab boyfriend, so she told the profiler she'd be staying at the Hilton Hotel in Bethlehem. The profiler knew there were only two Hiltons and that neither was in Bethlehem. When authorities searched Murphy's bag, they discovered several pounds of plastic explosives concealed in a false bottom and a microchip detonator hidden in a pocket calculator.

Behavior profiling is much more effective than racial profiling, Bezherano says, because it's not unusual for terrorist groups to outsource their operations to individuals or groups who don't fit the expected racial or ethnic profile.

Patrick Arguello was a member of the Sandinista National Liberation Front when he posed as the husband of a woman who was an operative for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to help her hijack the El Al plane.

Kozo Okamoto was a member of the Japanese Red Army, which attacked Ben Gurion Airport; the group shared the Marxist ideologies of the PFLP.

Bezherano says there's no reason to believe that al-Qaida won't, or doesn't, farm out some of its tasks to other groups. "The philosophy of terrorist organizations is that the enemy of your enemy is your friend," Bezherano says. "Even though al-Qaida is very extreme, [its members] will collaborate with others as long it as it serves their cause."

If those working to prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil engage in racial or ethnic profiling, they're merely playing into terrorists' hands -- and are likely to miss some of the enemies right in front of their eyes.

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