This.
I do a lot of “weird” things to feed my metalworking hobby. Collecting a bucket of black magnetite sand from a beach will get you weird looks but that’s about it. Collecting a pouch of pine resin (to make engraver’s resin) from trees surrounding a parking lot (that I now know to be for a homeland security building) will get you talked to by some friendly security folks.
I’m lucky that I’m perceived as a non-threatening minority (looking pretty damn Japanese), but I have to imagine that my homeland security experience may have gone down a bit differently if my heritage was middle eastern.
