Nicholas George planned to brush up on his Arabic vocabulary during a flight in August from Philadelphia to California, where he was to start his senior year at Pomona College. So he carried some Arabic-English flashcards in his pocket to study on the plane.
But those flashcards changed George's life far beyond the classroom. The 22-year-old from Pennsylvania is speaking out against what he contends are abuses by federal authorities in airport security measures.
George, a physics major who is considering a career as a U.S. diplomat in the Middle East, is suing the Transportation Security Administration, the FBI and Philadelphia police for jailing him after his flashcards were found and confiscated in a Philadelphia airport screening. His lawsuit, filed in federal court this week, said his four hours in detention, half of that in handcuffs, violated his rights to free speech and protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
The student acknowledged that a few of the vocabulary words, including "bomb" and "terrorism," may have alarmed authorities, but he also said he needed to learn them in order to understand the news of the day in Arabic-language newspapers.
I got some advice for the TSA. If you notice that a traveler is carrying Arabic-English flashcards, and that person already speaks fluent English, he probably is not an Arab terrorist, because he can't speak Arabic. That's what the flashcards are for.
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