I swear this is my last blog post today. I just wanted to share a bit of information with my beloved readers. I’m reposting a piece of writing by my cousin Danny, which I’m not allowed to call him anymore now that he’s An Adult. This really happened to him within the past couple of weeks. At first I thought, “this can’t be real… he just wrote a story.” And then my mom told me that yes, it’s real, and I was pissed off. Now, after reading it several times, I just laugh. Dan is only 20. It’s just too good. God bless america.

Back in July, shortly after moving into my apartment, I made a large mistake while backing up my computer’s hard drive, prior to reformatting it. This error resulted in the loss of a folder containing everything I’d written in the previous couple of years, save a few essays floating around in my email, my parents’ computer, or on paper.

As you may know, it is possible, if difficult, to recover such deleted information. Thus I found myself employing a small East Lansing firm run under the name Computer Data Recovery. Although their services are normally expensive as hell, the guy I spoke too was kind enough to offer to do the job for only a one hour “bench fee”; a modest ninety-five dollars. Being college student, it seemed like a lot of money to spend, and deep down, I knew that nothing was going to be recovered. Still, those bytes were important to me, and I couldn’t pass up a chance to get them back, whatever the financial strain.

The weekend past, and finally I received notice that the work had been finished. As the guy who did the work handed me the DVD containing the recovered parts of my hard drive (which of course included virtually nothing I was interested in) he asked me why I had so much information on explosives. I spent several moments feeling very confused, before finally remembering the copy of “The Anarchists Cookbook” which had been given to me by a friend years earlier, for the purpose of satisfying middle school pyromania. I felt slightly embarrassed as I explained it to him, then thanked him for his services and walked out the door. For a while, I wondered if he was likely to tell the authorities; he clearly worked with the police on a regular basis. Eventually, those thoughts faded, and I forgot them as completely as I had forgotten my possession of the cookbook.

A few days ago, my memory of the incident popped unbidden into my mind. I have to wonder if it was at about the same time that the information on me finally made its way to one Chris Guntern, a Detective Sergent with the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

This morning I returned from the bathroom to find a voicemail message from the good Detective, in which he introduced himself as working for the JTTF, and asked me to call him back and schedule a meeting to discuss some “information he’d received”. In the message, he assured me that I was “not a suspect”, but asked that I return his call at my earliest convenience. As it turned out, my earliest convenience was lunch, and I spent the intervening time speculating on what the call could possibly be about. He’d only identified his department by its acronym, and although it rung a bell, my best guess was that it stood for Juvenile Theft Task Force, and that the call was in relationship to a theft at Meijer, where I work. After lunch, having spoken with him, I went to a computer lab to run his office address through Mapquest, and I decided to Google JTTF while I was at it. Suddenly, I knew what the meeting was about.

After my second class of the day, I hiked over to the office building he’d directed me to. The main doors were locked; I had to enter through a side door, and walk through what seemed to be an empty office building to find the elevator to the second floor, where I found four doors, several security cameras, a posting of the FBI’s most wanted, and nothing else. Two doors were labeld “Employees Only”. One other was a bathroom. So I had only one option left: an intimidating door marked with only a strange peephole and an large combination lock, like what you would expect to find on a safe. After a moment’s consideration, I opened it, and found a small waiting room; clearly an FBI facility, but seemingly devoid of any personnel.

Feeling fairly unnerved, I walked up to an empty receptionist’s window. Finally, I found someone, a woman working in a cubicle deep in the dimly lit office on the other side of the glass. She saw me and came to the window, I told her the reason for my visit, and she went off to find the Detective.

After all that building up, I suppose you would expect me to claim that I was grilled under a bright lightbulb or something, but the interview was fairly relaxed and straightforward. He spent some time asking me about my status at MSU, about what interaction I’d had with law enforcement, asking me if I had any affiliation with militia or anarchist groups. I was not threatened in any way, even when I declined to tell him who gave me the suspicious materials in the first place. As the interview was concluded, he suggested that I dispose of any suspicious material I might have, and that I be more careful about who I hire to dig through my computer.

I’m not going to go running to the ACLU over this. Although he’d clearly run a background check on me – he had a copy of the information on my driver’s license, and information on the two traffic tickets I’ve recieved – there is no evidence that my privacy was violated in any serious way. Part of me finds the whole thing sort of annoying, however the annoyance rests mainly with the guy who gave the FBI the “tip” in the first place. Another, larger part of me finds it humorous – the same part of me that thought it was funny to pierce my hand with the sharpened allen wrench, that my friends and I found in a gas station a while back.

I’ve got to say though, it seems like there are better uses for FBI time. Stuff like the anarchist’s cookbook is readily available on the internet, and can actually be used for harmless fun, so how is it compromising to own it? The Detective Sergent seemed particularly concerned by the fact that the materials in my possesion included “The Unibomber’s Manifesto” (all this stuff came on one CD, as I recall). What is so dangerous about owning the collected ramblings of some psycho who watched Terminator a few too many times? The thing that really bothers me about this whole thing isn’t it’s impact on me, but just the idea that this is the kind of stuff that anti-terrorism funding gets spent on. Really, how many hours do FBI agents spend investigating perfectly harmless people like myself every year? How long before they miss a real terrorist, because they’re spending all their time chasing the suspisions of some dumb, paranoid civilian?