Motus Mentis

In a rare online moment over the holiday weekend, I ran across an article in the Daily Mail about how our Department of Homeland Security, in its restless hunt for loquacious malefactors, scans the Internet for alarming words. The article lists scores of examples.

I noted with interest, though, that the list is published on the paper’s website as an image, rather than as text — presumably because the editors of the Mail didn’t want Janet Napolitano and a posse of DHS bruisers paying them a visit in the wee hours. (After all, if a few words from the list are enough to attract attention, publishing the whole thing in a crawler-indexable form would surely be catnip.)

It seems to me that our guardians are casting rather a wide net. Here are some of the words and phrases they’re keeping an eye out for:

cops
drill
swine
initiative
incident
mitigation
facility
response
leak
cloud
biological
collapse
plume
gas
burn
recall
wave
resistant
lightening [sic]
sick
pork
strain
port
smart
border
enriched
relief
dock
erosion

I suppose I could, without much strain, close out this post with some remarks that would showcase a few of these words in a perfectly innocuous way, just to highlight what some might see as an erosion of our privacy under this cloud of constant surveillance. (You’ll recall that I have a certain facility for such tomfoolery.) But I’m resistant to the idea: it wouldn’t be very smart; there might be an unwelcome response (I could end up in the dock!) — and I doubt any of our readers would be enriched by it. But if you want to ‘drill down’ into the list, you can do so here.

As for me, I’ll just have a glass of port and call it a day. I’m so tired I’m about to collapse.