Yesterday I talked about the inneffectiveness of torture and racial profiling. To sum up, torture increases the likelihood of false positives while turning innocents against the government. Racial profiling works similarly, except that it allows more terrorists who don't fit the racial profile to pass through our fingers.
One of the other problems with racial profiling is that it's a very short-sighted solution. Not only does it limit our effectiveness against, say, Al-Qaeda (notice that they don't use Arabs to infiltrate the US as much, instead relying on converts or non-Arab Muslims), but keeping our eyes out for suspicious Arabs makes us less wary of any future terrorist groups. If there's really going to be a war on terror, it can't just be a war on Al-Qaeda. We need to figure out better security measures that work across the board.
Having said that, I am not going to pretend that increased security isn't annoying or potentially damaging to our civil rights. Annoying me in the name of safety is one thing (how long before the flight did you say I have to show up at the airport?), but infriging on my civil liberties is quite another. In fact, those measures which do hurt our civil rights are just short-sighted as well, and personally, I find them much more odious than another terrorist attack, because they're much wider-reaching. Let's take a look, for example, at the PATRIOT Act.
When the bill was being discussed in Congress, concerns were raised that it took too many liberties with our constitutional rights. The response was that the PATRIOT act was a temporary response to a national emergency, and therefore ought to be allowed to (temporarily) infrige on our civil liberties. But let me ask you a question: why does the PATRIOT act have a sunset provision? Did the sponsors really believe that if we checked enough library records, we could wipe out terrorism forever in five years? Of course not, that's why we have PATRIOT II, which looks to make PATRIOT permanent. Get people used to oppresive powers introduced in the name of a national emergency, then make those powers permanent–it's one of the oldest political plays in the book.
Let's not kid ourselves: the War on Terror, much like the War on Drugs, is never going to end. Are we headed towards a Syrian-style permanent State of Emergency? Will the predicted terrorist strikes "force" the White House to call off the election? Not that Bush cares about domestic safety; he's spending way more on foreign engagements (which ultimately make us less secure anyway) than "homeland security."
If we were really serious about this stuff, we would engineer our anti-terrorist laws such that they provide the maximum individual liberties while hunkering down for a long onslaught of future (and varied) terrorist groups. We need to make careful systemic improvements to security, not fascist slapdashery.
