Please give Big Brother the smackdown

Seriously, how many times do we have to needlessly trample civil liberties and privacy before we stop letting government profile us?

The Homeland Security Department recently revealed its Automated Targeting System (ATS) that tracks things like what meal you asked for on the plane, when and where you flew, how you paid for your tickets, and seating preference. How useful is this information in catching terrorists?

Government officials could not say whether ATS has apprehended any terrorists.

If you haven't spoken bureaucratese lately, that means ZERO. But it does make sure that my dad gets padded down every time he flies and that despite sending in all sorts of information to the government to try to get off the "watch list," he still has to go through extra security rigmarole every time.

This revelation is in face of research at MIT suggesting (as it has for some time) that random searches will beat computerized profiling any day, especially when we're dealing with potential suicide bombers.

But instead of searching potential terrorists, we're recording their seat and meal preferences.

I feel safer.

Racial profiling by name

Is there really anything more we can do to alienate otherwise friendly Arabs? We already have few enough friends in the Arab world. And even though there may only be 200,000 Arabs living in the United States, each one serves as an ambassador of American ideas to their relatives back home.

So it probably doesn't do us any favors to have Western Union, citing Treasury Department policy, prohibiting money transfers to people with Arab-sounding names. Here's just a few reasons why this is dumb:

• We punish innocent people with Arab names
  
• As a result, we further erode Arab opinion of the United States
  
• We don't actually prevent terrorist money transfers, because there are alternative money-transfer services.

I'm just glad there weren't any Irish terrorists involved in 9/11.