“So why didn’t we just use that profile after 9/11 and forget all this NSA mass intercept business?”
I don’t know! As you point out being PC trumps our safety. My son-in-law’s mother was born in an Internment Camp during WWII. And they lost pretty much everything as a result. But they did come back after the war and build a successful business in California. Even they understand why it was done and as bad as it was, it was necessary for our safety. Today, in the face of the obvious fact that the Muzzies are using our own laws against us, we sit around with our fingers up our you know what’s and let them get away with it. I want to puke every time I read how “most Muzzies” are wonderful, peace-loving people when everything in the Koran says otherwise.
Perhaps the saddest thing is the precious human losses we have suffered in the ME. And now with Mr. Cut and Run Muzzie in the White Hut, all those deaths will eventually be for nothing.
The response to 9/11 was completely misdirected, at enormous human and financial cost. Militarily, the U.S. went after the wrong people, a secular thug in Iraq, one of many in the world, instead of the Saudi theocracy. Homeland Security is just an excuse for a bureaucratic expansion of government powers. Instead of targeting the root causes, the Patriot Act and the NSA was unleashed against the constitutional rights of everyone.
Edward Snowden alerted us to the abuse, but not the causes. Bureaucracies will always abuse the privilege if given the opportunity, and we gave them a gaping opportunity. This privacy issue was always there, but only became a top-level problem when 9/11 opened the door to massive government intervention because we were afraid to face the truth about Islam. The reason was not the advance of computer technology; that is a cop-out argument.