Free Republic

The White House has still refused to name the “American Muslim leaders” with whom President Obama met to “discuss a range of domestic and foreign policy issues.” According to a White House statement on the President’s meeting, the domestic issues discussed were the “Affordable Care Act, anti-Muslim violence and discrimination, the 21st Century Policing Task Force, and the upcoming White House Summit on Countering Violence Extremism.” On the foreign policy front, “the President discussed the need to continue countering ISIL and other groups that commit horrific acts of violence, purportedly in the name of Islam,” while also congratulating Muslims on...

Last week, the Obama administration announced new curbs on racial profiling by federal law enforcement. Before deciding whether this is good or bad policy, we might try to develop a description/definition of racial profiling or any other kind of profiling. A good definition of profiling in general is the use of an easily observed physical characteristic as a guess for some other, difficult-to-observe characteristic. The reason people profile is that information is costly and they seek methods to economize on information costs. One way to do that is through profiling. Imagine a chief of police in a city where there...

Facebook is working on software that could prevent users posting unflattering photos of themselves. Combining image recognition and artificial intelligence, the system would be able to distinguish between drunk and sober pictures. It would ask: "Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?" The plan was revealed by the head of Facebook's artificial intelligence research lab. Speaking to Wired magazine, Yann LeCun said he wanted to build a Facebook digital assistant. In the future, this assistant might also be able to help identify when someone else has uploaded a picture of a user without permission,...

War On Cops: True to his word, Attorney General Eric Holder has released new national "anti-profiling" guidelines directing law enforcement to ignore "statistical evidence" generated by his own department. 'Even if there were overall statistical evidence of differential rates of commission of certain offenses among individuals possessing particular characteristics, the affirmative use of such generalized notions by law enforcement officers in routine, spontaneous law enforcement activities is tantamount to stereotyping," and therefore punishable, Holder warned in his 12-page guidance. "Even if?" Holder's acting dumb. He's fully aware such evidence exists. And it's highly relevant to proactive policing, because it shows...

In a heated exchange, PBS host Tavis Smiley told Sean Hannity that“racism is still the most intractable issue in this country, it's a part of everything we do still.”  He made this claim while discussing the incidents surrounding the police handling of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.  Mr. Smiley also stated, in refuting President Obama’s remarks on BET that we cannot compare what is happening now with what happened fifty years ago, “It is open season on black men, and it is in many ways as bad as it was fifty years ago.” The meme that Mr. Smiley and...

Attorney General Eric. H. Holder Jr. is expected early next week to detail long-awaited revisions in the Justice Department’s rules for racial profiling, banning it from national security cases for the first time. The changes will also expand the definition of profiling to prevent FBI agents from considering factors such as religion and national origin when opening cases, officials said.

It was after dark. I was taking a short cut to the convenience store through an alley. Ahead of me, a middle-aged white woman was walking down a side street and started to enter the alley. Upon realizing that I would be walking behind her, she made a quick turn out of the alley. Once inside the convenience store, I saw the woman come in. We were headed to the same destination, but she chose to take a different route. As a black man, should I be offended for being racially profiled? Well guess what? The night before, a late...

Facebook is mining its data of users' posts to find out how users feel about certain candidates or issues and sharing that data with ABC News and BuzzFeed for use in their 2016 reporting, the social-networking site will announce on Friday. The data will be gathered from the posts of Facebook users in the United States 18 and older, classifying sentiments about a politician or issue as positive, negative or neutral. The data can also be broken down into sentiments by gender and location, making it possible to see how Facebook users in the key primary states of Iowa or...

Sen. Ben Cardin said Tuesday that his legislation to prohibit law enforcement agencies from racial profiling had received renewed national attention after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., last month. Speaking at a briefing on Capitol Hill, the Maryland Democrat said the bill had "gotten new life" and that he hoped the proposal could forward this year. "How many more Michael Browns will we have?" Cardin asked. "We all know that profiling is un-American and wrong. We know it turns communities against law enforcement, where they need to work together."

I find it interesting that all of Texas' Most Wanted criminals are categorized as "White." Gotta boost those crime numbers!

A newspaper stated that some Muslim doctor is saying we are profiling him because he has been checked three times while getting on an airplane.The following is a letter from a pilot.This well spoken man, who is a pilot with American Airlines, says what is in his heart, beautifully. YOU WORRY ME! By Captain John Maniscalco, American Airlines Pilot I've been trying to say this since 911, but you worry me. I wish you didn't. I wish when I walked down the streets of this country that I love, that your color and culture still blended with the beautiful human...

In a rare triumph for common sense in Washington, it is being reported that the Justice Department intends to allow “tactical leeway” to the FBI to use ethnic profiling. This is welcome news for the security of our country. Profiling and stereotyping are a fact of life. Liberals vehemently argue that our law enforcement agencies should be prohibited from employing any form of profiling, arguing that you can’t tell anything significant about a potential terrorist just based on their religion, ethnicity or nationality. As is often the case, liberals manage to deny reality and embrace hypocrisy in one fell swoop....

Boise, Idaho (CBS SEATTLE) – An Idaho state trooper arrested and fully searched a 70-year-old Washington man’s vehicle solely because he had a Colorado license plate – a state where marijuana is legal – a federal “license plate profiling” lawsuit alleges. Darien Roseen was driving along I-84 between his second home in Colorado and Washington state on Jan. 25 when Idaho State Trooper Justin Klitch “immediately” pulled out from the Interstate median and began “rapidly accelerating” to catch up to Roseen, according to the complaint in a Courthouse News Service report. Exiting at a designated rest area, Roseen says he...

Jack Angelides was about to board a flight out of Israel’s international airport when he was given a curious choice that baffles him to this day. Traveling with a laptop and a stack of printed reading material, he was told to part with one or the other, due to unspecified security concerns. […] While standing in long lines, walking through scanners and removing belts and shoes are a fact of post-Sept. 11 travel worldwide, Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport seems to stand alone in the developed world with its security techniques, often leaving travelers dumbfounded. Though Israel denies profiling travelers, business executives,...

School officials at the University of Minnesota are working with black student and facility organizations after they wrote a letter to the school’s president about the racial descriptions given in crime alerts. The letter, sent on Dec. 6, 2013, was issued by members of the African American and African Studies, Black Faculty and Staff Association, Black Graduate and Professional Student Association, Black Men’s Forum, Black Student Union and Huntley House for African American Males. It was directed to University President Eric Kaler and Pamela Wheelock, the vice president of University Services.

The U.S. Justice Department is likely to widen a ban on the profiling of suspects by race to include other categories such as religion, country of origin, gender and sexual orientation, a person familiar with an internal review said on Thursday. Broadening the ban would mark a major policy shift for U.S. law enforcement and would address a frequent complaint by minorities in America who feel they are singled out for unwarranted extra scrutiny. Federal agents have been prohibited from profiling potential criminal suspects by race in almost all cases since 2003, but complaints persist of the unwarranted targeting of...

I started programming when I was 5, first with Logo and then BASIC. The picture above is me, age 9 (with horrible posture). By the time this photo was taken, I had already written several BASIC games that I distributed as shareware on our local BBS. I was fast growing bored, so my parents (both software engineers) gave me the original dragon compiler textbook from their grad school days. That's when I started learning C and writing my own simple interpreters and compilers. My early interpreters were for BASIC, but by the time I entered high school I had...

The Justice Department will significantly expand its definition of racial profiling to prohibit federal agents from considering religion, national origin, gender and sexual orientation in their investigations, a government official said Wednesday.The move addresses a decade of criticism from civil rights groups that say federal authorities have in particular singled out Muslims in counterterrorism investigations and Latinos for immigration investigations.The Bush administration banned profiling in 2003, but with two caveats: It did not apply to national security cases, and it covered only race, not religion, ancestry or other factors. Since taking office, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has been...

Black students at the University of Minnesota say racial descriptions in crime alerts does not help catch suspects. Instead, it's hurting black male students. There have been more than two dozen crimes on or near the U this year. Crime alert after crime alert describes many of the suspects as young black males. [Snip] Ian Taylor, a junior and president of the Black Men's Forum, said many of their members have expressed concern over how other students treat them. "You might walk a certain side of the street and someone might walk the other way or the other direction…just this...

The New York Police Department had legitimate reasons to put mosques and Muslim worshippers under surveillance as part of its counterterrorism efforts, a city lawyer said Thursday at the first court date in a civil rights lawsuit accusing the NYPD of religious profiling. Peter Farrell of the city Law Department argued that before the case goes forward, the city should be allowed to present evidence specific to the six plaintiffs that he said would prove police were acting on reasonable suspicion. If the judge agrees, "then this case is over," he said. An American Civil Liberties Union attorney, Hina Shamsi,...