Airport Security
Safety when traveling is something everybody should think about. More and more people all over the world are using airports, and security when flying has become a major concern. Recently, terrorists came up with a new method of attack. This method involved hijacking passenger airplanes and flying them into targets. On September 11th 2001, several planes were hijacked in the US and flown into the world’s tallest structure, the World Trade Center in New York, which completely collapsed killing thousands. The attacks shocked the whole world and led to important changes in anti-terrorism security at airports. One important change involved airport passengers being chosen for security checks. The computers now select passengers thought to be high risk based on ethnic origin: “U.S. law enforcement agencies have targeted people of Muslim, south Asian, and Middle Eastern descent” (Amnesty International). This system is controversial because people naturally worry about racism when ethnic origin is used. However, some people believe that profiling by race is acceptable because all September 11th hijackers were Arab, so that ethnic group poses a higher risk and because behavioral profiling, the method of finding the suspicious character by his or her movement, could not stop the terrorist incident. Ethnic profiling of passengers is now common in American airports and although some people think that this profiling is racist there is no doubt that it has increased security.
The main argument against ethnic profiling is that it is racist. Civil rights groups claim that many Muslims, “more than 1,200 non-U.S. nationals have been arrested in the US since 2001 but have not been publicly charged with terrorism” (Amnesty International). They have been held on selective immigration charges that have not been used against non-Muslims. Using American airports has become unpleasant for Muslim families. The women are afraid to wear head scarves and some Muslim people...