This isn't about profiling at all. It's about getting their foot in the door. If you can do it to Muslims, you can do it to anyone. When they want to "outlaw" a particular group of people, all they need is an excuse to create a new profile and your presumption of innocence will be null and void.

[edit on 14-1-2010 by crunchypickle]

Originally posted by Lillydale
Now let us just try this experiment.

You: Hi Shawn McIrishname, are you Christian?

Shawn: No.

Hmmm. Can you prove otherwise? How will you know he is a Christian if he says he is not?

You:Hi Muhamed Salaam, are you a Muslim?

Salaam: No.

Well, I guess they just defeated your highly intellectual profiling system just like that. This would be my point. I do not have a problem with focusing on points of origin. I do not even have a problem with skin color profiling as that will just lead to teams dealing with white terrorists and teams dealing with brown terrorists. That will all even out so go for it. I have a problem with Religious Profiling simply because it is stupid. Do not ask why unless my little play act there confused you.

Perhaps you are missing my main point. I wouldn't even be asking them questions like that. We have tools to profile without even interviewing the person, don't be naive. 90+ people with Saudi citizenship are Muslim. I will take offending 10 out of 100 to make sure I take a look at every Saudi Muslim. With certain nationalities, you can determine their religion with a very high probability. Since the common denominator of AQ terrorist is that A.) They are Muslims and B.) They are radicalized Muslims makes it pretty obvious to me who I should be looking for if I am on the lookout for AQ terrorists. I have stated it won't be 100% effective, but it will work better than what we are doing now. I don't think we disagree that much, you seem to think that religion would be a hard trait to determine, I don't with certain nationalities and added profile characteristics.

Hell, with the proper mailing list in America, you can target a very select group of individuals and have detailed demographics on them, are you telling me a massive network of intelligence agencies can't do even more?