Thursday, November 21, 2013

"you people"

An Arab professor at a major medical school in the US told me this story:  "A number of people in Beirut gave me mail to deliver in the US [back in 1980]. The immigration officer at JFK in NYC proceeded to methodically open them one after the other. When I protested her act as an invasion of privacy, she calmly answered that there is "no privacy protections when it comes to  you people". It was the first and last lesson I ever needed about privacy and its protections."