Racial profiling uses "race or ethnic appearance as a broad predictor of who is involved in a crime or terrorism." As a de facto policy, racial profiling dismisses the legal principles of "innocent until proven guilty" and "preponderance of evidence," and instead relies on "probable cause," "reasonable suspicion" and, perhaps most importantly, "compelling interest" to justify arbitrary interrogations and detentions. In effect, racial profiling constitutes the criminalization of entire groups within the US. Racial profiling is the domestic counterpart of Bush's new foreign policy based on preemptive strikes: profiling and preemption work together to define the human targets of the "war on terror." Objectionable on legal and political grounds, racial profiling of Arabs and others from the Middle East is also a particularly imprecise law enforcement mechanism given the tendency in the US to confuse and collapse Arabs and Muslims into one category, or to misidentify South Asians, Latinos, Africans and others as Arab Muslims. In the case of Arabs, racial profiling is premised on equating an "Arab-looking" person with terrorism. This equation conditions the October 2001 USA PATRIOT Act, which grants US law enforcement and intelligence authorities unprecedented surveillance and investigative powers
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