My last post was serious, so I thought I’d have some fun with this one. I don’t remember how or why it started, but four decades ago my college roommate and I had a running joke. We used to laugh about the poor (fictitious) FBI guy who listened to our phone conversations and bugged our dorm room. How bored must he have been?

From there, my mind jumped to today. Technology has made it a lot easier for the government to keep track of us. I think I’m pretty law-abiding, but then there’s my search history! Aah, a writer’s search history. If I actually had an FBI guy, he’d have a field day with my search history. And if my FBI guy is actually a lady (I know two female FBI agents), she’d be just as puzzled.

Here are some of my recent searches. Again, these are all research for my current novel. I am a very gentle, law-abiding person, though my search history must be driving my FBI guy mad.

• how to blow up a house (this was quite a few searches for amounts, types, and placement of explosives)
• do police cars have GPS (can they follow you if you steal a police car?)
• Defense Intelligence Agency
• competitive chess, Judit Polgar vs Viswanathan Anand
• German pastries
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
• tracking IP packets
• the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago
• The Peninsula Chicago
• Chicago Symphony Orchestra, layout of the symphony hall
• history of guilds
• famous swords
• industrial 3D printers
• railguns
• Chinese naming conventions
• Stargate Project
• prepaid phones
• how to disappear (live off the grid)
• KATIM phones
• spider anatomy
• free energy minimization, Dr. Karl Friston
• natural language processing
• layout of a cargo ship
• and more…

How worried should my FBI guy be? Tell you what, if he can figure out how I put all this information into a novel, I’ll buy him a beer.