Profiling is preferable to the alternatives:

Expanding the use of profiling will help to restrict the use of invasive security monitoring strategies such as body scanners and intimate, full contact pat-downs. Body-scanning and patting-down all travelers, including older disabled men and women, is an excessive, expensive and humiliating approach to passenger safety. Many civil rights groups in addition to consumer’s rights organizations and air-travel business analysts feel very strongly that invasive security procedures violates passengers’ privacy. Profiling those individuals that are a real potential threat is a good way to avoid these problems. As Thomas Sowell argues, proponents of invasive pat-downs and body scanners “would rather have scanners look under the clothes of nuns than to detain a Jihadist imam for questioning."[1] Alternatives to profiling are far more invasive and likely to be more offensive to Muslims than profiling would be.  With broad screening of all travelers for example there is likely to be less security as security resources are directs onto people who are not a threat so offending everybody rather than just a tiny minority. For each search of a passenger who a profiler would regard as highly unlikely to engage in violent activity in plane or an airport , there is a near-negligible impact on security attention and resources. However, when this impact is accumulated over the millions of passengers who fly each year, the effect does indeed become measurable. In essence, by spending billions of dollars on scrutinizing the wrong people, security forces are depleting a reserve of resources that could be spent in screening passengers who are materially more likely to constitute a threat.[2] Broad screening also creates long lines of people awaiting security at airports. Not only does blanket screening reduce the efficiency of airport operations, impacting on the profits of airlines and the businesses that contract with them, security queues themselves could become targets for terrorists, for example through suicide bombings designed to kill an airplane’s worth of passengers before they even get through security. By definition, pat-downs and body scanners cannot prevent such a threat (indeed they add to them by creating long lines), but profiling can, by picking up on suspicious individuals from the moment they enter the airport, or even from when they book their tickets.[3] Profiling also rightly shifts the security focus from cargo to people. Better knowing who is flying allows security forces to know which cargo (luggage) they do need to or do not need to investigate for explosives or drugs, instead of having to search all or do (ineffective) random checks.[4] Therefore security profiling is preferable to the alternatives of body scans and invasive pat-downs, both in terms of security efficacy and also in terms of sensitivity to travelers. [1] Sowell, Thomas. "Profiling at airports works for Israel". The Columbus Dispatch.  24 November  2010.  http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/editorials/stories/2010/11/24/profi... [2] Jacobson, Sheldon H. "The Right Kind of Profiling". New York Times Room for Debate.  4 January 2010.  http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/will-profiling-make-a-... [3] Baum, Philip . "Common Sense Profiling Works." New York Times Room for Debate. 4 January  2010.  http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/will-profiling-make-a-... [4] Sela, Rafi. "Multilayered Security". New York Times, Room for Debate. 4 January 4 2010. http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/will-profiling-make-a-...