[damnfine]

Taking off the tinfoil hat, stripping away his race, and religion, this guy still reads suspicious as hell.

1. Postgrad, with connections around the world, but works airport job. Ramp agent for Delta.

2. Uses new credentials to fly to previously unavailable places immediately.

3. Many mentions of odd behavior, taliored suits, frequent travel to other odd places.

Its a shame he can't know why, but there does seem to be a reason. Assuming there is a security risk to revealing the reason, what would be a better method of limiting disclosure? This seems to be a problem with classification, not skin color or faith.

[seabird]

This article also mentions that a large portion of these cases seem to be Muslim. The obvious reasoning behind this is that the Middle East and its large Muslim constituency is one of the US' largest security concerns, and it has been for many years. Things have been happening under the table there since the Iran-Contra affair and probably even before that. I'm willing to wager that the other non-Muslims on this list are from or connected to areas of similar interest (Eastern Europe, South America, North Africa, etc).

The subject of this article may be inadvertently a part of something he has no knowledge of, or may have regular contact with another person of interest who seems otherwise unrelated to his everyday life. There's a lot of possibilities here that don't require the magic power of racism or prejudice to make any sense.

[eesmith]

And this is "suspicious as hell" because ... why?

Your points #1 and #3 were true even before he had the background checks for both working at an airport and for a global entry card. Why should they not be suspicious before, but be enough now to change his status?

How many other people meet those three criteria?

Are you sure you aren't selecting these three criteria post hoc? For example, after the Madrid bombing an Oregon lawyer was arrested on suspicion of being involved. Quoting http://www.nbcnews.com/id/5053007/ns/us_news-security/t/fbi-... :

> As additional evidence in support of Mayfield’s arrest, the FBI pointed to Mayfield’s attendance at a local mosque, his advertising legal services in a publication owned by a man suspected to have links to terrorism, and a telephone call his wife placed to a branch of an Islamic charity with suspected terrorist ties.

> They also noted that Mayfield represented a man in a child custody case who later pleaded guilty to conspiring to help al-Qaida and the Taliban fight U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

The FBI seems to have thought that lawyer was "suspicious as hell", but wouldn't have started looking at him if the fingerprint hadn't been wrongly identified as being his. I believe you are doing the same - thinking that someone is guilty then looking for things that confirms your suspicion, without considering how the process itself biased your answer.

Without a background rate, which includes other criteria you might come up with for other people, you can't really know if those three criteria really are suspicious.

As someone with odd behaviors, I don't know how to interpret your #3. It sounds like people who don't conform to what you think of as normal are not to be trusted.

The practices like not shaking hands with women are, as the article says, common to people from Mali. The reason for his wardrobe choice is also not that uncommon; it's called "dressing for success." Many people do it.

Also, others dress up for different reasons. http://mashable.com/2015/08/08/black-men-dressing-up-police/ points out that some black men deliberately dress in a suit because it's physically safer and it deflects prejudice. This practice is over a century old. How unfortunate that you might find this "odd behavior" done to avoid suspicion itself suspicious.

What do you consider to be an "odd place"? The only named travel was to Germany, for a conference. How is that odd? Am I odd for having traveled to Africa? Does that make suspicious in your eyes?