Clifford D. May--a former New York Times foreign correspondent and currently the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (a policy institute focusing on terrorism)--pens a helpful column defending profiling. But not racial and religious profiling.
So if racial and religious profiling is not a good idea, what kind of profiling is? Terrorist profiling -- which simply means utilizing all the knowledge that has been gathered over recent years about those who have committed acts of terrorism: what they've done, how they've lived, where they've been and how they've behaved.
On 9/11/01, America was attacked by 19 terrorists. Every one of them – a statistically significant 100% -- was male, young and from a country where influential elites support and encourage Militant Islamism.
Does that suggest that security officials should give more attention to a young man from Saudi Arabia than to a young woman from Denver? Should a retiree from Orlando be of less interest than a perspiring teenager whose British passport indicates a vacation in Afghanistan in 2000 followed by a visit to Chechnya?
If we had infinite resource and time, we could scrutinize all passengers equally. But we don't. Either we prioritize screenings on the basis of reliable data and rational risk analysis – or we kid ourselves and, sooner or later, sacrifice lives on the altar of “political correctness.”
