Profiling Doesn't Work, Ashcroft Shows Why

I got into a debate about ethnic profiling a while back. Now while I don't want to get into charges and counter-charges ad infinitum, I would like to show how John Ashcroft makes my point for me. At a recent press conference, Attorney General Crisco Head revealed the following about U.S. intelligence reports:

Our intelligence confirms al Qaeda is seeking recruits who can portray themselves as Europeans. Al Qaeda also attracts Muslim extremists among many nationalities and ethnicities, including North Africans and South Asians, as well as recruiting young Muslim converts of any nationality inside target countries.

This is why any ethnic profiling system (or any other type of profiling system) is doomed to fail. All a terrorist has to do is find out what the "profile" is and recruit somebody who doesn't fit the profile. As a report by MIT students has shown, the United States would be safer if the money we spent on "profiling" were reallocated to security devices used for searching everybody (like metal detectors and baggage X-rays) and security procedures that search people at random. If we assume that the procedures search the same number of people, random security procedures are safer than procedures based on profiling, because it is always possible to "reverse engineer" the profile, whereas it is impossible to determine who will get selected by a random process. Any other "profiling" occurring will result from the discretion given to security personnel to act on hunches. It should not be institutionalized as policy.

Last but not least, "terrorists" are practitioners of a tactic, not members of an ethnic group. It doesn't matter whether a courthouse gets blown up by Al-Qaeda or by a white supremacist militia. The damage in property and human lives is the same. To make it sound like terrorism is something that only the "Ay-rabs" do is not merely racist, but counterproductive to improving real security.
- posted by Jon @ 10:38 PM |