As that last link shows, a system based on profiling will demonstrably work less well than random screening. As Bruce Schneier (among others) argues:
The problem with automatic profiling is that it doesn't work.This last bit gets to the second, and I'd argue more important, failing of racial/religious profiling: not only doesn't it work, it's also immoral. It's immoral for the same reasons that apartheid, Jim Crow laws, and the internment of Japanese-Americans were immoral. Using those broad markers as a basis for how we treat individuals means that we ignore the person, reducing that person to whatever stereotype we choose to impose. It's bad public policy, and it's bad police work.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. …
As counterintuitive as it may seem, we're all more secure when we randomly select people for secondary screening — even if it means occasionally screening wheelchair-bound grandmothers and innocent looking children. And, as an added bonus, it doesn't needlessly anger the ethnic groups we need on our side if we're going to be more secure against terrorism.
---SPSmith
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