American Civil Liberties Union

In the 1993 film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character finds himself repeating the same miserable day over and over again. For Indian film star Shahrukh Khan, last week was Groundhog Day for racial and religious profiling. In 2009, Khan — a huge global celebrity whose likeness is immortalized in wax at Madame Tussaud's — was traveling to the United States to celebrate Indian independence day and to promote a movie about a Muslim man who is the victim of profiling called My Name is Khan. In a case of life imitating art, Khan who is also Muslim, was detained and questioned at Newark airport.

The Los Angeles Times today reports on the TSA’s VIPR program, in which roving teams of security agents bring the joys of the airport security experience into bus and train stations, highways, the subway, and other transportation facilities around the country (a Daily Caller story on the program from earlier this year is here).

The New York Times had a great editorial in its Sunday paper that outlined the continuing issues with terror watch lists.

As if traveling weren't a hassle already (now even more so with invasive body scanners), imagine if your name were placed on a terrorist watch list. The lists are secret so the only way of knowing would be to find out when, perhaps, you're already late to your flight and suddenly pulled out of line for extra screening — or even denied boarding altogether. And there are no solid and trustworthy mechanisms to remedy mistaken identification and absolutely no way to remove your name from the list; the so-called "redress" process involved complaining to a government entity without authority to fix the problem and hoping that a faceless bureaucrat will correct a mistake or change his mind.