That was my understanding too. I thought that “racial profiling” meant screening certain members of a group who are all engaged in the same non-suspicious behavior just on the basis of their (apparent) race. E.g., when you’re X-raying the shoes of airline passengers or checking the backpacks of subway passengers, if you pick only the black-haired dark-skinned men to check, that’s racial (and gender) profiling.
And I thought the point was that that kind of screening isn’t really sensible, because the odds of any individual in that subgroup being a terrorist aren’t substantially different from the odds of any other individual among the passengers being a terrorist. When you’ve got a huge bunch of harmless people of all backgrounds taking a plane or riding the subway, racial profiling isn’t really statistically likely to be of any use in catching the extremely tiny percentage of terrorists among them.
When you’re talking about a small number of individuals engaged in behavior that you have some reason to think is suspicious, though, that’s somewhat different. Apparent ethnic background might be a valid contributing factor to concern levels there.
Perhaps the real question here is “Should taking photographs of nuclear plants automatically be regarded as suspicious behavior?”
