The recent internet kerfluffle over body-scanners and molester-guards has raised once again the question of racial profiling. I say "internet kerfluffle" because that is exactly what it was. Internet junkies and activists worked up the froth and bubble and... and then nothing. This is because we tend to get confused between The Internets and Real
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Except that we could specifically profile for terrorists without targeting all Muslims. The problem is that we won't because we're being told that profiling for behavior associated with terrorism is equivalent to profiling for race alone, which is a fallacy.
Example,
A smiling Muslim family en route to Disney World, with a domestic two way ticket to Florida for the week. Yeah probably not a threat. A young single Muslim man in his early 20s, with a one way ticket from Yemen to New York, with a faint chemical smell on his clothes, spotted loitering nervously around some unmarked bags in the lobby... yeah, maybe we should look twice there.
The problem is, we are operating under the mistaken assumption that there are no warning signs for terrorism, other than someone's race or religion, so therefore we must screen everyone. That isn't accurate. In fact, for both the shoe bomber and underwear bomber, the government knew about them. First of all, the Underwear Bomber was already on a government watch ( ... )
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But of course, simply implementing racial profiling is not the fix-all or solution to these issues. It's a complete non-sequitur. The fact that we can't coordinate intelligence is no argument for racial profiling.
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