How I Passed My U.S. Citizenship Test: By Keeping the Right Answers to Myself

In addition to having the wrong answers, some of the questions make no sense.  On top of that, how many of these questions really test whether someone is ready to be a US citizen in the first place?

I think we should come up with a set of new test questions.  Questions that ask important information.

How I Passed My U.S. Citizenship Test: By Keeping the Right Answers to Myself

In addition to having the wrong answers, some of the questions make no sense.  On top of that, how many of these questions really test whether someone is ready to be a US citizen in the first place?

I think we should come up with a set of new test questions.  Questions that ask important information.



Apparently the test was written in 2008 by Homeland Security-under the Bush Administration. That explains all the errors.



Cat

Like the literacy tests of old.  Incomprehensible, incorrect, unAmerican.  8-P

"Just give the official answer," I said, "and you'll do fine."


That's the only answer that matters in an age when everything you say is recorded for posterity.

To pick just one example, the right to be secure in one's "...papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures" means that everything you say on the phone, write online, or go while carrying a cell phone is recorded forever, but as long as nobody decides it's worth the effort to find something in the database for which you can be convicted, no search has been conducted.  That's the closest summary of reasonable I can find that doesn't require a security clearance.  (The only person willing to risk his clearance over the issue is in an airport Moscow, seeking asylum from the Americans.  And even he never got his hands on the FISA decisions, which are also classified.)

I wonder how I'd answer the question about direct or indirect support of crimes against humanity.  I mean, I've paid my taxes.  Some of those taxes went to waterboard people.  I think I'd write "Insofar as the courts have deemed waterboarding (when performed by US-allied interrogators against prisoners opposed to the US) 'aggressive interrogation' and not (as it obviously was back in the day when NVA was doing it to American troops!) 'torture,' I haven't funded organizations that have been convicted of, let alone charged with, torture.  And even if a court subsequently determines that what we do to our prisoners is torture, it wasn't direct support because the money was laundered through programmes funded by Congress!  And even if indirect support of interrogation tactics that may or may not be torture (which for the record I neither confirm nor deny, because I only saw pictures of it all over the Internet and read briefs from lawyers from both the Bush and Obama Administrations defending/legalizing it, but that's not proof any of it actually happened!) is a bar to citizenship, that's still OK because of the tens of thousands of dollars a year I pay in taxes every year, torture's cheap, so my actual contribution is probably less than $0.10, which is not material support.)

Same thing with warrantless wiretapping and retroactive immunity for telcos and ISPs for said wiretapping several years before Snowden confirmed what we all knew all along, but I'm too lazy to type them out.


"Just give the official answer," I said, "and you'll do fine."


Except that lying to a USCIS officer is a deportable offense, so the only options that simultaneously ethical and legal - are to not apply for citizenship at all until the test questions can be answered without lying.  (...or, to know the rest of the material well enough that you can score high enough on the rest of the while answering truthfully on the important questions, but still get a passing grade.)

If anyone wants to take an oath of citizenship that badly, I'm OK with that.  More power to ya.  It'll be your country when right, and when wrong, yours to be set right.