Despite being the subject of online ridicule for months, flyers put out by the FBI under the ‘Communities Against Terrorism’ program, which frame behavior including using cash to pay for a cup of coffee as a suspicious activity, have been characterized as reasonable by the mainstream media, even as the New York Times admits that the FBI has originated most of the recent terror plots in the United States.

 

In a bizarrely headlined story entitled Are You a Terrorist?, CBS 12 lends the flyers credence by completely failing to mention the fact that they include a list of mundane behaviors that have nothing to do with terrorism or any relation to “suspicious activity” whatsoever.

As we highlighted earlier this year, one of the flyers sent out to Internet cafes instructs businesses to report people who regularly use cash to pay for their coffee as potential terrorists.

Other examples of suspicious behavior include anyone expressing concern about privacy while surfing online in public, which far from being a ‘suspicious activity’ is almost a prerequisite for using the web these days.