[Originally published at Corrente.]
Gee, the "behavior detection" stories are starting to come thick and fast, aren't they?
Here's a new one, from Matthew Good:
Hot/Live that’s what the US customs officer [a branch of DHS] at Detroit Metro Airport wrote on my customs declaration form as he asked me to follow the blue line.
They were actually very polite and I wasn’t really bothered until they pulled out my laptop. At first I thought they probably want me to just turn it on to make sure I wasn’t hiding a bomb in it. But then I was asked to put in my password and soon one of the customs officers was going through my personal files and photos. Something that really bothered me, I felt a complete invasion of privacy.
I was questioned behind the reason I had a document saved from a Lebanese newspaper, I then explained my interest in middle east politics and that I used to write for Dose and I blog occasionally. This was followed by the question "Do you write anti American material".
And it keeps getting better:
I said I didn’t, that I mostly concentrated on Middle East politics but for some reason one of the officers said that sometimes even Americans wrote anti American material. I really wanted to say that those are probably the ones that are in jail. They then asked for the websites addresses that I blog on (So Matt, you might get a couple of extra fans) ...
Now on to the major reason I am writing this... Does anyone know what the phrase (Hot/Live) on the customs form means?
Of course, Matt is Lebanese by birth, so he was guilty of flying while brown. Let's be reasonable here.