Justice Department To Begin Racial/Ethnic Profiling

The usual disclaimer: I posted about this in an open thread last night, and have done a quick search to find a diary on the issue but came up empty handed.

From the AP we get the following headline:

Race profiling eyed for terror probes.

And the first paragraph of the story pretty much says it all:

The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups.

I took the liberty of bolding the most outrageous parts of the paragraph, and it ended up being the whole damn thing as you may have noticed. The idea behind this is of course not all that new or surprising, but that they are being so open about it is new. I guess now that they have completed the first steps of allowing open spying on our communications, they can proceed to step 2. What makes me think there is a link between the spying and this, besides common sense of course? One of the other paragraphs from the article:

The new policy, law enforcement officials told The Associated Press, would let agents open preliminary terrorism investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that, taken together, were deemed suspicious.

What does it take to be suspicious?

travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity, access to weapons or military training, along with the person's race or ethnicity.

Access to guns? Sounds like anywhere in America. Race or ethnicity? Surely they will be profiling white Christian right-wing lunatics like McVeigh.

As I said in my open-thread post last night, this is such a dangerous slope. Why is terrorism a special case for disavowing our civil rights. More recently more people have died in the US from school & mall shootings than terrorism. To some this would be cause to begin profiling young males like myself who happen to listen to some heavy metal music. Drug dealers? Bank robbers? Where do you draw the line at racial, ethnic and religious profiling?

Ive always beet pretty comfortable with the FBI being a crime fighting agency. Especially their political corruption units. However apparently for some the Department Of Homeland Security wasnt enough:

The change is part of an update of Justice Department policies known as the attorney general guidelines. They are being overhauled amid the FBI's transition from a traditional crime-fighting agency to one whose top mission is to protect America from terrorist attacks.

•  Tips

  for innocent until proven guilty.

  by LieparDestin on Thu Jul 03, 2008 at 12:59:35 PM PDT

  •  Ummm.

    This diary isn't about FISA!

    I'm confused.

    Tip and rec!!!

    by Lava20 on Thu Jul 03, 2008 at 01:05:25 PM PDT

    •  Did I put FISA

      in the tags or something? Wouldn't surprise me as Ive been planning a diary on that as well so it was on my mind. If so, thanks for pointing it out/fixing it!

      by LieparDestin on Thu Jul 03, 2008 at 01:08:08 PM PDT

    •  actually,

      it's closely related.

      by jlynne on Thu Jul 03, 2008 at 01:21:40 PM PDT

•  this made my local paper

  this morning

  I'm stunned to see it show up only now, here

  FISA seems, in many ways, a technical argument that only lawyers can win

  this seems fundamental, basic, simple

  and wrong

  fundamentally, simply wrong

  we cannot keep coming up with excuses for the government to spy on citizens

  and I'm normally not the paranoid one

  by Shocko from Seattle on Thu Jul 03, 2008 at 01:13:24 PM PDT

  •  Spot on!

    by Lava20 on Thu Jul 03, 2008 at 01:42:05 PM PDT

•  I met a guy at a Seder a few years ago

  who told me this story:

  He was pulled off an international flight for questioning at a major US airport, because records showed he had made a suspiciously large number of flights to and from Hamburg. As it happens, he works in as an IT consultant and his job required frequent visits to a German client. It didn't help that he had a good tan at the time of the incident.

  That isn't the end of the story. When he convinced his questioners that he wasn't an Al-Qadea man, they let him get back on the plane before takeoff. The other passengers looked disappointed and nervous to see him again, and the man in the next seat asked to move.

  The allegeded terrorist suspect was a Jewish guy named Schwartz. Hel-lo? Is there an active brain inside that head?

  by Kimball Cross on Thu Jul 03, 2008 at 01:18:05 PM PDT

  •  In fairness,

    someone interested in concealing his identity as a terrorist might use a pseudonym.

    Part of the reason terrorism is so scary is that anyone could be a terrorist. The problem with our current paranoia is twofold. First, you don't properly fight terrorism through data mining but rather, through gangbusting and other policing tools; second, we assume that terrorists are going to be Muslims, where really, anyone with a grudge, with a good sense of planning, and without a lot of empathy for the people around him could be a terrorist.

    Not that it's particularly likely, either. That's the final thing to remember about terrorists, how rare they are.

    by Shaviv on Thu Jul 03, 2008 at 02:32:39 PM PDT

•  "Where do you draw the line...?"

  You don't, citizen.

  by Shaviv on Thu Jul 03, 2008 at 02:25:57 PM PDT

•  The FBI will not be running this show.

  The data mining will be outsourced to such as Booz Allen Hamilton, who will also perform the analysis and then tell the FBI who to investigate. That's my 2¢, reading between the lines.

  Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

  by Halcyon on Thu Jul 03, 2008 at 05:01:59 PM PDT