Without more concrete information of what constitutes terrorist activities, Americans must rely on their own perceptions of what "suspicious behaviors" are in order to be able to identify someone as a potential terrorist, and the removal of men and women from flights because they wear the hijab or speak Arabic because their fellow passengers profile them exemplifies this citizen surveillance. In May 2016, the Washington Post reported an incident where a woman wrote a note to an American Airlines' flight attendant about the suspicious behavior of the passenger sitting next to her. The passenger had dark curly hair and olive skin according to the article in the Washington Post (Rampell 2016). He was writing something that appeared suspicious to the passenger, like it was a code of some sort. After removing the suspicious passenger from the plane, the airline discovered that Guido Menzio, the man who was removed, is an Italian award-winning Ivy League mathematician who was simply writing out a mathematical formula on a piece of paper. The unrecognizable math, mistaken for code or Arabic, and perhaps his appearance cast his body as suspicious to his fellow passenger. The reasons a citizen might suspect his or her fellow passenger are not called into question but instead are taken seriously by the state.

XREF: Connects to broader security-state literature on how ambiguous terror definitions push surveillance onto ordinary citizens, who then police appearances and behaviors.

Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, loc. 60