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Comment by cdmcmahon | Hacker News Reader

I'll (possibly inaccurately) assume this is in good faith. The most obvious reason that profiling is bad, even in your inaccurate and simplistic hypothetical scenario, is that just because all airplane terrorist attacks came from people of X country, does not imply that everyone from X country commits terrorist airplane attacks. Therefore you are unfairly and immorally forcing invasive searches on many innocent people of X country. If you have any empathy for the innocent people of X country, you will realize how horrible this is.

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Israel profiles like crazy and it works well. When I was traveling through there, I got a lot more questions. It just makes sense. A lone adult males traveling versus an Israel senior citizen.

Israel is an apartheid state founded on ethnonationalism from day 1. I don't think it's a great example to follow.

the parent's assumption is "if you have any empathy for X people". from deir yassin to modern day. That assumption does not hold.

> Therefore you are unfairly and immorally forcing invasive searches on many innocent people of X country. If you have any empathy for the innocent people of X country, you will realize how horrible this is.

Okay, we are talking about an extra 5 minutes of scrutiny, not cruel and unusual punishment. I don't think it's really that "horrible" to make people from countries with bad track records jump through some extra hoops.

To use a real example... it would be like me doing extra background checks on Chinese people applying to my company vs. Norwegian people. Not all Chinese people are spies, of course, but I've never heard of Norwegian moles infiltrating US companies and lifting IP back to the motherland being a rampant problem.

> Okay, we are talking about an extra 5 minutes of scrutiny, not cruel and unusual punishment.

5 minutes if you decide to go along and reveal your entire digital life to the TSA.

We'll have to agree to disagree about the invasiveness. In the case of the lawsuit in the original post, it's the search of all your electronic devices. I consider that to be quite invasive.

Furthermore, CBP and ICE both claimed their authority to search electronic devices at the border extended to US citizens, so much of the profiling was not just of people from certain countries, but from people whose ancestry was from certain countries.

Lastly, I can't and won't try to convince you that it's wrong to subject people of various backgrounds to different, worse treatment, whether it's "cruel and unusual" or unfair, or invasive, or even simply inconvenient. It sounds like you aren't usually subject to such treatment or else you would probably have a different outlook on it. I recommend talking or listening to some people who do, and what their experiences are like.

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