Don't overstate the result here: this paper says that (mathematically speaking) if you want to find terrorists in a crowd with as few checks as possible, it is

Don't overstate the result here: this paper says that (mathematically speaking) if you want to find terrorists in a crowd with as few checks as possible, it is optimal to profile rather aggressively, you just shouldn't do so directly in proportion to the probability that each person is a terrorist, but instead sample in proportion to the square root of that probability. This is not super surprising mathematically - there's no reason we ever should have assumed that P(terrorist|race) is exactly proportional to the optimal sampling frequency if we want to find terrorists when all we know is race, all we'd assume up front is that there's some relation.