What To Google To Get The Government To Show Up At Your House

Choire Sicha
The Awl
Published in
1 min readAug 1, 2013

He travels to Asia for work. She looks up pressure cookers online. And God only knows what the 20-year-old boy in the house Googles. That combination, apparently, is how you get a “joint terrorism task force” to show up at your door on Long Island:

“Meanwhile, they were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked.”

“Where are your parents from” is a pretty chilling question. Relevant: “They mentioned that they do this about 100 times a week. And that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing.”

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