Racial Profiling for Terrorists: Good or Bad?

[Rodion Romanovich]

If you disagree with the effectiveness of "racial" (or whatever) profiling please let us know why.

Datamining and wiretapping can only catch terrorists who communicate. Terrorists working alone will not be caught. After a few cases of terrorists being caught, they will all change strategy and go alone, which means they can't be caught. Then you're back where you started - with no gains in the war against terrorism, but with one difference - you've made your country wiretap it's citizens, you've violated their integrity, and you've already created the hateful demonized feeling that has in history always ended with genocide. The end result is therefore the loss of something, without the gain of anything.

If you look at previous examples in history where datamining and wiretapping of the citizens was carried out, you'll see that that's something that has only existed in malfunctioning, violent and authoritarian societies - for instance Nazi Germany, Communist USSR, Mao Zedong's China, DDR, Mussolini's Fascist regime and The Khmers in Cambodia, to mention a few. Interesting also to note is that previously to the usage of datamining, wiretapping and controlling the citizens, these societies worked a lot better than they did after a few years of all the surveillance.