The Obama administration on Monday will formally announce long-awaited curbs on racial profiling by federal law enforcement, but the new rules will not cover local police departments, which have come under criticism in recent months over allegations that their officers profile suspects.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has expanded Justice Department rules for racial profiling to prevent FBI agents from considering gender, national origin, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity, in addition to race and ethnicity, when opening cases. The department also will ban racial profiling from national security cases for the first time.

Hmmm.  If A beats up B, the FBI is not going to consider any of those things in deciding whether to charge a federal hate crime or leave it to the local authorities as a routine assault case?  Of course the FBI should not engage in "invidious discrimination," charging a person with a crime or a greater crime because of animus against that person based on some characteristic irrelevant to the situation.  But sometimes these factors are relevant.

Can the TSA consider the fact that a person is an adherent of a fanatical strain of Islam and comes from a hotbed of terrorism when deciding whether to screen him a bit more carefully before letting him on an airplane?  Yes, the TSA is exempt.  So is such consideration legitimate or not?  Sounds like DoJ is straddling the fence, and the fence is made or barbed wire.