Pre-empting his own quickie review into aviation security, Gordon Brown announced on Sunday that “the use of full body scanners” would soon be phased in. The move follows Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s alleged attempt to down a plane at Christmas. Naked imaging is now in prospect for all sorts of passengers, except under-18s – for whom an exception will have to be made if the fight against one collective anxiety is not to inflame another. The costly new machines will exacerbate the delay and hassle of air travel, without necessarily preventing another Abdulmutallab-style attacker from boarding a plane. Some experts insist that the low-density materials deployed on Christmas Day would not get picked up, and the sense that the decision is being rushed in advance of the evidence only inflames the doubts. Such controversies, however, concern the detail. More scans and searches of some form might well be a price it makes sense to pay in return for safer travel. The same cannot be said of the other proposal reportedly in Whitehall’s mix. Profiling passengers on the basis of race and faith, in order to single them out for more thorough frisking, would ultimately do the cause of security more harm than good. Systematically treating Muslim or non-white passengers less favourably will create a mood of anger that surely provides the best breeding ground for militant jihadism. Still, encouraging the spread of the mental virus might be a risk worth running if profiling could render the contagion less deadly. But overseas experience suggests it does not work – detailed demographic profiling of 8