Security technologist Bruce Schneier explains from a technical point of view why racial profiling won't increase security:
Terrorists don't fit a profile and cannot be plucked out of crowds by computers. They're European, Asian, African, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern, male and female, young and old. Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab was Nigerian. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was British with a Jamaican father. Germaine Lindsay, one of the 7/7 London bombers, was Afro-Caribbean. Dirty bomb suspect Jose Padilla was Hispanic-American. The 2002 Bali terrorists were Indonesian. Timothy McVeigh was a white American. So was the Unabomber. The Chechen terrorists who blew up two Russian planes in 2004 were female. Palestinian terrorists routinely recruit “clean” suicide bombers, and have used unsuspecting Westerners as bomb carriers.
Without an accurate profile, the system can be statistically demonstrated to be no more effective than random screening.
But from the perspective of those advocating for racial profiling, there isn't much difference between a Jamaican Muslim, a Nigerian Muslim, a Hispanic Muslim, or an Indonesian Muslim. It also doesn't matter that you can't necessarily tell someone's religion by looking at them. The point is that non-white people are suspect.
The national security policies that the torture wing of the GOP is pushing for, despite the pleas of experienced national security folks from their own party, are all based on the same premise. They are not calling for torture or the trial of all suspected terrorists by military commission because the regular functions of due process are inadequate for bringing an individual to justice. They support these things because they are a means of exacting retribution or striking fear into the group they see as collectively responsible for terrorism. That's why it doesn't matter that the vast majority people we've imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay are not guilty of anything -- the point is to "send a message."
Profiling, like torture, isn't really about national security. It's about levying a kind of extra-judicial collective punishment against Muslims as a whole. So it doesn't matter that profiling is unconstitutional or even that it's bad policy from a security point of view. The fact that such a policy would treat "Muslims" as second-class human beings based on mere circumstances of birth or national origin is a feature not a bug: It keeps "those people" in their place. The message of intrinsic Western superiority is the point. And al-Qaeda couldn't have written the script better if they'd tried.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration is caving on racial profiling while, uh, "changing the mood music" as Peter Baker put it, as though racial profiling works better or creates less blowback when you're nice about it.
-- A. Serwer
