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STO P 1862 A. The Applicability of the Terry Limitations 1862 B. Specific Investigative Techniques 1874 1. Records Check 1874 2. Questioning Vehicle Occupants 1885 3. Obtaining Consent to Search 1891 4. Sniffing by Drug Dogs 1894 III. THE FINISH: FROM SEIZURE TO "CONSENSUAL

Imagine for a moment that it is the year 2020. An American company has developed a mind-reading device, called the "brain wave recorder" ("BWR"). The BWR is a highly sensitive instrument that detects electrical impulses from any brain within ten feet of the machine. Though previously thought impossible, the BWR can discern the following information about the target individual: (1) whether he or she is happy, sad, anxious, depressed, or irritable; (2) whether he or she is even slightly sexually aroused; (3) whether he or she is taking any medication (and if so, what the medication is); (4) if a female subject, whether she is pregnant; (5) whether he or she is experiencing a feeling of guilt or remorse; and (6) whether he or she is having aggressive impulses toward another person or persons. At this stage in its development, we do not know whether or not the BWR will advance beyond detection of this information and whether or not it will become generally available to the public. It is currently a technology that belongs exclusively to the government and to extremely wealthy private collectors. Under Professor Orin Kerr's provocative and interesting thesis,1 federal or state police could use the BWR on innocent people without implicating their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable

Under court orders in past and pending cases, the Maryland State Police maintain a uniquely detailed, publicly available database on the stops and searches they conduct on Interstate Highway 95. In this article we present a comprehensive review of those data, from 1995 through mid-2000, and discuss the problems that are inherent in using official records to study police conduct. We conclude that the Maryland State Police plainly do use race and ethnicity to decide who to stop and who to search, apparently in an effort to increase the tiny proportion of stops that lead to arrests of drug traffickers and to seizures of large quantities of illegal drugs. As a factual matter, it is unclear how this "racial profiling" effects drug seizures, since our knowledge of the drug trade is limited to information derived from racially discriminatory police investigations. As a legal matter, the practice is clearly unconstitutional. Fourth Amendment doctrine is ambiguous, but there is little doubt that this form of racial profiling violates the Equal Protection Clause. More important, racial profiling on the highway has become politically unacceptable, and remains so even with the heightened concern about security after September 11, 2001. It is easy to see why. Not only does this practice victimize and humiliate thousands of innocent minority drivers, but it serves no positive function of consequence, since the drug interdiction program in which it occurs has no discernable effect on drug trafficking.