My Washington bureau colleagues Mike Schmidt and Eric Lichtblau wrote a revealing story Sunday on the charges of more than 30 Transportation Security Administration officers at Boston's Logan International Airport that a program intended to spot terrorists has instead degenerated into racial and ethnic profiling.
@import url(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/projects/assets/agenda/agenda-inline.css);It's an interesting exhibit for one question we are raising through The Agenda series, which looks at some big issues facing the country during the presidential campaign: Is all of the bulked-up counterterrorism machinery built after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks still critical to protect Americans from Al Qaeda and o ther violent extremists, or is it time to rethink and scale back?
Underlying the bad-news T.S.A. story is a piece of remarkable good news: There aren't very many terrorists trying to mount attacks in the United States, and the police and intelligence net strung across the country detects most of those who contemplate violence long before they are able to do so. This has been evident for years and is widely discussed by rank-and-file investigators.
But the understandably aggressive approach to any hint of another 9/11, including laws that boosted the power of government to pursue possible leads, sometimes has unintended consequences. Last year, Colin Moynihan and I wrote about a Texas anarchist-activist named Scott Crow whom the F.B.I. had tracked for years, justifying the surveillance in part on the grounds that Mr. Crow might be plotting violence. Agents sat in S.U.V.s outside his Austin house for days on end, writing reports on the unremarkable comings and go ings of Mr. Crow, his roommates and guests. They tracked his e-mails and phone calls, planted a video camera across from his home and combed through his trash but found nothing incriminating.
Such intrusive conduct on the part of government agencies is clearly part of the fallout from 9/11, which made many Americans more willing to put up with aggressive policing if it could prevent the next attack. But today, with an army of investigators assigned to hunt for terrorists, and few terrorists to be found, minority air travelers passing through Boston and non-terrorist activists like Mr. Crow arguably have become collateral damage.
- Racial Profiling Rife at Airport, U.S. Officers Say
