The scuttlebutt is that the Justice Department will announce today new guidelines on racial profiling by federal agencies. The Bush administration had banned the practice in traditional law-enforcement contexts, but the new guidelines are expected to expand that to include more national-security cases, and to have it apply not only to race but also to sex and religion, for instance.

I’ll read the new guidelines with interest. In the meantime, I’m linking here to Senate testimony I gave in 2012 on this topic, making these basic points: “(1) care must be taken in defining the term “racial profiling”; (2) the amount of racial profiling that occurs is frequently exaggerated, and care must be taken in analyzing the data in this area; (3) with those caveats, racial profiling as I will define it is a bad policy and I oppose it, with (4) a possible exception in some antiterrorism contexts.”