Homeland Security sniffs the wind….
Everybody knows that you don’t say “bomb” at an airport. It’s just a bad idea. But how about social media? You can say anything you want there, can’t you? You should be able to figure out the answer to that question. The answer is, yes, technically you can, but if you say certain things, the Department of Homeland Security is going to take notice. We’ve known for a while that the government has had its eye on social media and after Leigh Van Bryan was arrested for tweeting the words “destroy” and “America” in that order, it became clear that tweets can be taken very, very seriously, but how many words could possibly be on the DHS’s watch-list. A bunch. A whole bunch.Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, some documentation pertaining to social media monitoring was released, documentation that just happened to contain the full list — presumably — of words that the DHS likes to keep an eye on. Ostensibly, this isn’t expressly for hunting down potential terrorists and other ne’er-do-wells, but rather for monitoring trends in general — meme tracking — and keeping any eye on the way events unfold on social media. That being said, if you use any of these buzzwords, it’s more than likely that some suit is taking a gander at your text, so remember: Sedition Free is the Way to Be!
Without further ado, here’s a full list of buzzwords organized by the topic with which they are associated, as far as the DHS is concerned: