You understand how bayesian reasoning works, right? There are probably between three and six <i>million</i> muslims in France alone. Whatever monitoring you&#x27;re doing, you&#x27;re proposing to find on the order of a few hundred people, if that. False positives (which, remember: we cannot distinguish from actual positives) would end up targeting orders of magnitude more innocent people than guilty.<p>Worse, by breaking the compact of a free and just society with respect to a single religious group (<i>cough</i>), you&#x27;re basically doing the terrorists&#x27; jobs for them - you end up marginalizing and disenfranchising huge swaths of your population (remember again: millions of people in France alone). Even if one is not not ethically and morally appalled by your proposal, the problem remains: your proposal would probably contribute <i>more</i> to radicalization than any other single action the terrorists themselves could take.<p>It is at a time like this when we most need to stick to the principles of a free, just, and open society. We need to re-affirm those, and I say that as an American who has lived through the post-911 transition into a security society. Learn from our mistakes: we&#x27;ve gone and made people <i>more</i> radical, spent <i>more</i> civilian and military lives, because as a nation we somehow thought we could fix the &quot;muslim problem&quot; through fighting and surveillance. Neither worked.<p>What will (eventually) work is working toward a nation and a world where all people are free and equal. Sure, there may still be attacks against such a nation, but that&#x27;s what police are for (when the police are also just and equal). Furthermore, it&#x27;s a <i>lot</i> harder to radicalize people when they live in a safe and just society that pays attention to them. I&#x27;m not surprised at all, given how non-muslim westerners have treated the religion and people, that we are seeing radicalized people.<p>And aaaaalso, this bears mentioning although it&#x27;s kind of tangential. Not all muslims are brown. Not all muslims speak bad english &#x2F; french. Consider all the work Imperial Japan did to wipe out christianity (you can&#x27;t tell a religion by looking at someone), and all they did was make it stronger and drive it underground.<p>Consider: in the US, actually, the biggest terrorist threats come from white people. White people of the white-supremacy and militant-anti-abortion camps are responsible for far more terrorist attacks on US soil than ISIS and al-qaeda combined. We, as a nation, just don&#x27;t really like to talk about surveiling all white people. It&#x27;d be ridiculous, a fact we understand instinctively because the white narrative is the non-marginalized one.