Follow-up

I was actually going to post this yesterday, but I forgot. But it still deserves posting, so here it is.

On August 5, I made reference to documents showing that the Department for the Security of the Fatherland had obtained from the Census Bureau statistical information on Arab-Americans - but not, apparently, on any other ethnic group. The reason given, which I described as a "lame excuse," was to see at which airports Arabic-language signs should be placed.

The Daily Star (Lebanon) for Thursday had a follow-up.

The US Census Bureau and the US Department of Homeland Security, in response to concerns from an Arab-American group, said Tuesday the US government did not seek the zip codes of people of Arab descent and would not use data collected on Arab-Americans for law-enforcement purposes.

The Arab-American Institute, the most prominent Arab lobby in the US, joined over 40 minority and civil liberties groups in raising "grave concern" that census data on Arab-Americans would be shared with the Department of Homeland Security. ...

In response to the letter, representatives of the Arab American Institute and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee met last Friday with Daniel W. Sutherland, the officer for civil rights and civil liberties at the Department of Homeland Security, and Robert C. Bonner, commissioner of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection. ...

According to a department statement, the Arab-American Institute conflated two separate policies, one of which sought to create foreign-language signs at airports and the other to collect information on "countries of concern" listed by the US Department of State.

Neither program, the department said, "asked for identification of Arabic speaking people or Arabic ancestry by zip code."

The department also said that US Customs and Border Protection, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, deleted the data and did not "release any of this information to any other agency."

All good, if true, especially the destruction of data part. But, cynic that I am, I still have questions. The denial was, based on the article, limited to saying they didn't break the information down by zip code. Well, how far did they break it down? And in what other ways? And since I still don't understand how this information could be useful in deciding where to put signs at airports, why was it obtained in the first place? Why only on Arab-Americans? Does being an American citizen of Arab descent mark them as being from "a country of concern" and therefore suspicious?

Personally, I don't think all the questions are answered here. But let's suppose for the moment that it was in fact an innocent misunderstanding. I hope at least it will drive home to government types how serious a matter racial profiling is and how much of a threat people perceive it - I say accurately - to be.