Racial profiling is controversial but the New York Police Department has found a way around that. They do linguistic profiling. In the course of a court hearing,Thomas P. Galati,commanding officer of the NYPDs intelligence division,confessed to harbouring an unhealthy interest in Urdu-speaking people. His demographic unit,with a staff of eight,has been eavesdropping on thousands of Urdu conversations in shops and restaurants in New York City,New Jersey and Long Island. When Urdu palls,the unit pursues Bengali speakers. This strategy,ostensibly to pre-empt terrorists from Pakistan and Bangladesh,cannot possibly work because these languages have cross-border footprints. Galatis people are wasting their time listening to perhaps half a lakh Indians in New York who speak Urdu or Bengali. Besides,spoken Bengali is audibly different on either side of the border,while everyday spoken Urdu sounds rather like Hindi. Only listeners well-versed in these languages can really tell the variants from each other. And going by Galatis replies to questions,it is hard to imagine that he is linguistically competent. Im seeing Urdu, Galati said. Im using that information for me to determine that this would be a kind of place that a terrorist would be comfortable in. Could a man who speaks this pidgin possibly be competent in any human language? Pre-emptive security aims to identify terrorists. Nationality,ethnicity and mother tongue are secondary because terrorism is transnational. To invert this logic and focus on language opens the door to profiling and pervasive snooping,precisely what US civil libertarians had warned of in the Bush era. Ironically,this is happening under a Democrat government.
