is profiling wrong?

[luke warm]

or are officials allowed to use what used to be called "judgement"?

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060816/ap_on_...enger_profiling

[hotShot]

Terrorists try to have a low profile prior to their act. This means no false parking, no speeding and nothing else that could catch attention.

 

So from the moment they think being single might get attention, they will hide themselfs behind a marrige certificate. And those who are crasy enough to blow themselfs up, will find children to blow up with them, if they think that will make them successfull.

 

So like lots of other actions that were taken up to now, it won't help, but it is giving away something important from our culture.

Discriminating young, single arabic looking people, has at least a rassistic touch.

[whereagles]

Racial profiling is a proof that mankind has still a long way to go before being ethically advanced. Sad but true.

[helene_t]

This is already happening. It is not related to this terrorist hype. Drug smuglers have always been singled out. Even if it's against the official policy.

 

Ten years ago, during an international volunteer project in the Netherlands, we had a discussion about whether you were required to show your passport when travelling by train across an internal EU border. I said that my experience from Denmark was that brown-eyed people do while blue-eyed people do not, but me impression was that it was more random in the Netherlands. Then we asked everybody if they had been asked to show their passport when entering the Netherlands. Of 24 travelers (appr. half blue and half brown) all brown-eyed travelers had been asked to show their passport, versus none of the blue-eyed.

 

It's possible that one or two lied because they wanted to boost the statistics. Anyway, I learned not to profile police officers on the basis of Dutch vs Danish nationality.