Why racial profiling doesn’t work

From the Washington Post:

Fifth and finally, al-Qaeda is covetously seeking recruits from non-Muslim countries who can be easily deployed for attacks in the West. The group’s leaders see people like these — especially converts to Islam whose appearances and names would not arouse the same scrutiny that persons from Islamic countries might — as the ultimate fifth column. Citizens of countries that participate in the U.S. visa-waiver program are especially prized because they can move freely between Western countries and blend easily into these societies.

Or: as soon someone knows what you’re looking for, your enemies know how to defeat you.

But let’s say that we did decide to profile all Muslims. We still have the basic problem of “What does a Muslim look like?” Muslim and Arab are not the same thing. Names can be misleading, as we saw with Richard Reid.

As I said in a recent Friendfeed thread (improper capitalization due to laziness and typing on my phone):

here’s the thing: how do you determine who is muslim and therefore should be screened? By name? The name richard reid doesn’t set off alarm bells. And what about christian arabs, or south asians who are hindu or parsi but have an arabic first name? By appearance? Can you discern between a pakistani, bangladeshi, indian, and a guyanese-indian-american christian? What about between an indonesian (muslim country) and a thai (buddhist one)? Or a black american convert to islam from any other black american? Or a gabonian parisian from a black american? A kosovar from a croatian?

Not only would anti-Muslim profiling be a logistical nightmare, but it actually makes us less secure because we only scrutinize those who we think need to be scrutinized.