1. The ignorance on the part of the police and agents was stunning. Conflating Hindu and Muslim?
2. The explosive alarms.... Evidently they are set to detect some very common household chemicals. Based on the story I am assuming the culprit in this case was household ammonia. It isn't clear to me that the agents would have any idea as to what could trigger a false positive either.
About the "ignorance" on the part of the FBI guy, I wouldn't believe anything an interrogating officer tells me. Playing dumb is one of the oldest tricks in the book: "So, tell me about the religion you claim to profess and about which I know nothing so you can bullshit me, really".
The detectors are most certainly cheap ion mobility spectrometers. They ionize the sample and sort the resulting cloud by the speed at which the ions move in an electric field in a low pressure gas. The resulting spectrum is fairly unique to each chemical.
The obvious problem is that you get a superposition of spectrums of multiple chemicals from the sample and that the devices being cheap and fast produce "blurry" spectrums, so you get a lot of false positives.
It isn't a far leap to theorize that a good deal of oppression and aggression comes from an ancient, primal racism: the desire to remove competitive males and tribes from gene pools. Look at the mass number of black males incarcerated in the War on Drugs, and how eagerly we label any military-age males as "enemy combatants" in the War on Terror. You can even read this into Russia's paranoia that the West's "gay propaganda" is a plot to destabilize their collective male fertility.
To say that we're the only species to engage in murder and genocide is flat wrong: chimps will happily murder other chimps, even infants [1]. Maybe we're not as civilized as we think we are, and all the narratives and uniforms and laws are just theater to subsume and rationalize our animal savagery.
Nothing is ever simple, so I can't imagine this tells the whole story, but it's a big big factor, and it doesn't help anyone to ignore it.
Personally I find the racist overtones to be the least scary aspect of this story. I grew up in rural Texas; for police/government officials to conduct their work with a base level of racism is, while frustrating and sickening, pretty much to be expected. Kafka-esque detention, authoritarian abuse of power, and the hinted-at FBI search of the OP's apartment scare me a lot more.
Hell, casual racism is basically an (awful) American tradition. Unreasonable search and seizure most emphatically isn't.
"Unreasonable search and seizure most emphatically isn't."
Anyone who has been investigated for a DWB might disagree.
Casual racism and unreasonable search and seizure have been pretty consistently tied together as a common standard in policing, not just in the U.S, but across the world. There is something in the way that police organisations operate that makes them particularly susceptible to treating racist stereotypes as probable cause.
I had a little start-up idea a while ago .. albeit only tangentially related to this one.
Make a deal with JC Decaux, or some similar out-of-home advertising company to place cameras (strategically) around the City of London.
Nominally to provide personally tailored advertising, the significant secondary purpose is to use face recognition to identify individuals-of-interest: specific traders, fund managers and so on.
This enables us to analyse facial expression, gait, maybe body temperature to determine mood, then look for correlations in the stocks and markets that these individuals trade.
I think that this will be legal, since all the information that you are using is (nominally, at least) legal, and gained in a public place.
After all, if it is OK for the authorities to place the whole population under close surveillance, they cannot possibly object if we turn around and do the same thing to their paymasters, can they?
The best type of test depends on the type of software being developed. For the sort of statistical software that I have been involved with, I think that system level tests (with synthetic and/or real data) give tremendous bang for the buck. This is particularly true if the data is high volume, relatively homogeneous (in some sense), and most of the top-level interfaces are fixed fairly early on. Many other projects are not like this, and so may benefit more (proportionally) from different approaches to testing.
I was very, very impressed by the translation - kudos goes to the Google translate engineers. If this high quality of translation can be achieved consistently, it marks a pretty significant step in human progress.
