Jan Ting in PBS Newshour

On Homeland Security: Terrorism dragnet: more profiling and not less profiling

TING: I think the dragnet makes a lot of sense. No one is profiling Arab-American men. We’re profiling foreign men who have temporarily come to the US in the past couple of years. It seems to me that’s a legitimate focus. The government has a compelling interest in preventing another terrorist attack. We know that all the 9/11 terrorists were young males from other countries who came to the US recently. So that’s a reasonable profile. I think the case could be made for more profiling and not less profiling. I don’t think that it’s racial profiling. I don’t think it’s ethnic profiling in the sense of identifying people on the basis of skin color or on the basis of appearance.