Two travelers from Ireland were arrested on arrival in the United States after they joked on Twitter (where you account can be managed by Tweet Adder ), about “destroying America” and “digging up” Marilyn Monroe’s grave. Leigh Van Bryan and Emily Bunting flew to Los Angeles International Airport only to be arrested on arrival by the Department of Homeland Security. They were interrogated by agents about the nature of their Twitter posts. Bryan said:
“The Homeland Security agents were treating me like some kind of terrorist.”
On his Twitter account, Bryan had stated that he was going “to destroy America, ” in relation to the amount of partying he would be doing while also stating his remark about Monroe’s grave.
It seems as if government agencies are taking a keen interest in what is being said on social websites, like Twitter where you account can be managed by Tweet Adder. In fact, the FBI is said to be looking at ways of scraping and scanning for information on publicly viewable comments on these sites.
A lot of agencies have looked to improve their intelligence sources from such sites, and it is more than likely that Bryan and Bunting’s comments were picked up in one of these scans. The only problem with such a method is the fact that such comments can be taken out of context and be misinterpreted.
Bryan and Bunting were put on return flights to Europe after their interviews with the Department of Homeland Security and it certainly seems they were not privy to the context to which the words were said in. It is a risk any such scan of social media will inevitably have though as people saying almost anything imaginable, and distilling the correct information from the irrelevant sources can be difficult. The advice is then is to never Tweet anything controversial before traveling!
