I'm Canadian, Indian heritage, and I practice Hinduism. Based on Aditya's article, I feel like we're probably similar with respect to our "religiousness".
What happened to him is horrendous, and scary. I'm currently living in Palo Alto for work, but every time I travel to and from the USA, I'm always in fear. That said, I have never had an issue; mind you, I've never made the explosives detector beep. I always elect for the pat down too.
While the TSA employees aren't always the friendliest, I haven't had any memorable run-ins with them. On the contrary, they've been actually nice at times. It helps that I always travel clean shaven, and speak to everyone as politely as any Canadian can. :-)
As a counterpoint, the only instance of racial profiling that I encountered while flying was actually in Sault Ste. Marie, ON, Canada. I was traveling with some colleagues back to Toronto; they were Caucasian, and I was the only non-Caucasian. The security agent at the airport decided to "randomly" select me for explosives screening. She was the lone agent, and it's a tiny airport. No one before or after me was "randomly" screened. No one else was non-Caucasian.
I'm not saying that security agents should be fearful of choosing a non-Caucasian for random screening, lest they be accused of profiling or racism. I'm saying that random screenings should actually be random. Also, I can't verify this hypothesis myself since I sucked at probability theory, but I'm pretty sure that only selecting 1 person out of 250+ passengers traveling through the airport is an insufficient sample size for actually detecting a person who may be carrying explosives; you should probably be randomly selecting more people.
That's interesting, because every Canadian airport that I've been to (and admittedly I've been mainly to the larger ones) has had an electronic mat that you stand on that lights up a sign with an arrow to the left or right, telling you whether you should go to the standard metal detectors or the millimeter wave scanners (or a patdown if you so choose). The idea presumably being that when a machine is choosing, it leaves no room for profiling. I've never seen those in any American airport I've been to.
What happened to him is horrendous, and scary. I'm currently living in Palo Alto for work, but every time I travel to and from the USA, I'm always in fear. That said, I have never had an issue; mind you, I've never made the explosives detector beep. I always elect for the pat down too.
While the TSA employees aren't always the friendliest, I haven't had any memorable run-ins with them. On the contrary, they've been actually nice at times. It helps that I always travel clean shaven, and speak to everyone as politely as any Canadian can. :-)
As a counterpoint, the only instance of racial profiling that I encountered while flying was actually in Sault Ste. Marie, ON, Canada. I was traveling with some colleagues back to Toronto; they were Caucasian, and I was the only non-Caucasian. The security agent at the airport decided to "randomly" select me for explosives screening. She was the lone agent, and it's a tiny airport. No one before or after me was "randomly" screened. No one else was non-Caucasian.
I'm not saying that security agents should be fearful of choosing a non-Caucasian for random screening, lest they be accused of profiling or racism. I'm saying that random screenings should actually be random. Also, I can't verify this hypothesis myself since I sucked at probability theory, but I'm pretty sure that only selecting 1 person out of 250+ passengers traveling through the airport is an insufficient sample size for actually detecting a person who may be carrying explosives; you should probably be randomly selecting more people.
TL;DR - USA yay, Canada nay!