Sure, and personally I'm not saying they literally set a bunch of engineers out to build a machine to explicitly target black people. I am saying that they probably didn't put the same level of testing there in that they did against disproportionately targeting white men in business suits when they were pitching investors and getting senators / the people who sign the checks to buy these things.
Or maybe they just didn't think about testing the machines against the diversity of actual people who go through an airport daily vs. who was available in the office at the time to test with.
Maybe they honestly believe that folks with natural black hairstyles, or who wear a 'turban' or ponytail, could be disproportionately hiding something suspicious up there, and we need a machine to tell us to check them out more often.
Hell, maybe they just didn't care at all who got flagged, as long as it didn't inconvenience them too much and they got paid at the end of the day. I mean they sure as shit don't mind the reality that this really does seem to be a lot of security theater with little benefit, besides the benefits to some peoples wallets.
Whether you want to define any of that as deliberate malice, willful ignorance, laziness, the banality of evil, or something else, is entirely up to your own values I suppose.
Or maybe they just didn't think about testing the machines against the diversity of actual people who go through an airport daily vs. who was available in the office at the time to test with.
Maybe they honestly believe that folks with natural black hairstyles, or who wear a 'turban' or ponytail, could be disproportionately hiding something suspicious up there, and we need a machine to tell us to check them out more often.
Hell, maybe they just didn't care at all who got flagged, as long as it didn't inconvenience them too much and they got paid at the end of the day. I mean they sure as shit don't mind the reality that this really does seem to be a lot of security theater with little benefit, besides the benefits to some peoples wallets.
Whether you want to define any of that as deliberate malice, willful ignorance, laziness, the banality of evil, or something else, is entirely up to your own values I suppose.