Juvenile ethics in full swing.
More stringent screening launched on Monday for airline passengers from 14 nations, part of a crackdown after the botched Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound flight, are ineffective and unconstitutional, civil liberty groups charged.
The tighter security measures, which range from passengers being patted down to advanced explosives detection and full-body scans, constitute racial profiling when there is no realistic way to predict the national origin of a potential attacker, the American Civil Liberties Union said.
The measures announced by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration affect passengers arriving from Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria — nations listed as “state sponsors of terrorism” — as well as Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen.
Michael German, national security policycounsel with the ACLU Washington legislative office, said that singlingout travelers from a few specified countries for enhanced screening “isessentially a pretext for racial profiling, which is ineffective,unconstitutional and violates American values.”
“We shouldn’t complacently surrender our rights for a false sense of security,” he said in a statement.