pressure cookers, backpacks and quinoa, oh my!
Wow.
https://medium.com/something-like-falling/2e7d13e54724
It was a confluence of magnificent proportions that led six agents from the joint terrorism task force to knock on my door Wednesday morning. Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling. Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. Someone whose job it is to piece together the things people do on the internet raised the red flag when they saw our search history.
Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in “these times” now. And in these times, when things like the Boston bombing happen, you spend a lot of time on the internet reading about it and, if you are my exceedingly curious news junkie of a twenty-ear-old son, you click a lot of links when you read the myriad of stories. You might just read a CNN piece about how bomb making instructions are readily available on the internet and you will in all probability, if you are that kid, click the link provided.
Which might not raise any red flags. Because who wasn’t reading those stories? Who wasn’t clicking those links? But my son’s reading habits combined with my search for a pressure cooker and my husband’s search for a backpack set off an alarm of sorts at the joint terrorism task force headquarters.
That’s how I imagine it played out, anyhow. Lots of bells and whistles and a crowd of task force workers huddled around a computer screen looking at our Google history.
= new reply since forum marked as read
WTF with that? Is the beef industry worried that we'll find our complete protein in the plant kingdom?
J/K
K/R
it's losing not loosing 
And no comments on my overuse of commas either (or...under use LOL)
Now, that said - I am all with you the day the federal government allows us the same access to them as they want to us.
But that, I am sure, will be a cold day in hell.
The government has nothing to fear from the people as long as they are the doing the job we asked them to do. Apparently, they are not doing that job or they would not be so afraid.