Husband googles backpacks. Wife googles pressure cooker. Police knock on the door days later

[Chris.B]

brought to you by your liberal president.

Liberals are a disgraceful piece of sh!t

 

[jackswstd]

Who the fukk goes around googling backpacks and pressure cookers? fukk *expects a knock on my door tomorrow*

 

[Fillerguy]

I make sure to google suspicious items at least once a week

 

[Blackking]

There are all these resources about what to do if the FBI comes to your door, but realistically..... they usually don't come unless they have a pretty good case against you.... and even if they don't, we've given them this right due to us not rioting and going crazy over law changes.... Other nations go nuts over a raise in toll booth charges, we allow this type of stuff to happen to us without a military putting pressure or anything..

 

[Robbie3000]

Why don't one of you brehs conduct an investigation and google those items.

 

[daze23]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...pressure-cooker-get-a-police-visit-maybe-not/

The FBI denies a Long Island journalist’s claims that a local Joint Terrorism Task Force visited her house after she searched the terms “backpack” and “pressure cooker” on Google. Now the question is: Who did? And, perhaps more importantly, did it actually have anything to do with Google?

Michele Catalano, a writer for Forbes and the Web site Death and Taxes, set off a blogosphere firestorm on Thursday when she wrote a post on Medium claiming that “six agents from the joint terrorism task force” asked to search her home and questioned her husband about subjects that seemed to correspond to their recent Google searches.

“This is where we are at,” Catalono wrote. “Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list.”

But after reading the questions Catalano says investigators asked her husband, it’s clear that they could come from information that is not Catalano’s search history — say, an anonymous tip from a jumpy neighbor. (Maybe someone who noted this Facebook picture.) And there’s little to suggest Catalano is on a watch-list or that any terrorism investigators were involved, at all. A spokeswoman for the FBI’s New York field office, out of which the New York and Long Island JTTTs are based, said the investigation was led by the Nassau County Police Department with assistance from the Suffolk County Police Department, and the FBI was not involved.

“They were officers from the Nassau County Police Department who identified themselves as such,” said Kelly Langmesser, the FBI spokeswoman. But mysteriously, neither the Nassau nor Suffolk County Police would confirm their involvement in the investigation Thursday afternoon. An officer from the Nassau County Police repeatedly refused to even give her first name; a Public Information Officer in Suffolk County said she would comment when she had more information.

All of this sounds very shady, but it doesn’t exactly scream of an insidious, privacy-invading terrorism investigation. At least it’s impossible to make that conclusion without more information. As Catalano wrote in her post, the investigators asked her husband pretty innocuous questions:

Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? … Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb?​

There is also, it’s worth remembering, a specific legal procedure for both the FBI and local police who want to obtain Google data, a topic Google has been very open about:

The government needs legal process—such as a subpoena, court order or search warrant—to force Google to disclose user information. Exceptions can be made in certain emergency cases, though even then the government can’t force Google to disclose …

Respect for the privacy and security of data you store with Google underpins our approach to complying with these legal requests. When we receive such a request, our team reviews the request to make sure it satisfies legal requirements and Google’s policies. Generally speaking, for us to comply, the request must be made in writing, signed by an authorized official of the requesting agency and issued under an appropriate law.​

According to Google’s annual Transparency Report, the company received 8,438 such requests in the United States last year — the most of any other country it tracks. Police can also bypass Google and obtain search data through other means from users who don’t use encrypted (https) search.

 

[daze23]

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/01/em...e-in-pressure-cookerbackpack-gate-not-google/

In what might be Medium‘s first widespread Twitter moment, music writer Michele Catalano used the platform to blog details of an unexpected visit to her home yesterday, from six men she identifies as members of the “joint terrorism task force.”

Catalano asserts that the visit was likely prompted by her husband searching for the term “backpacks” in close conjunction with her searching for the term “pressure cookers.” Or something.

Turns out the visit was prompted by the searches, but not in the way most speculation asserted – by a law enforcement-initiated, NSA-enabled dragnet of the couple’s web history. It turns out either Catalano or her husband were conducting these searches from a work computer. And that employer, “a Bay Shore based computer company” called the police on their former employee.

The Suffolk County PD has just released the following information related to the case:

Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. The former employee’s computer searches took place on this employee’s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks.”

After interviewing the company representatives, Suffolk County Police Detectives visited the subject’s home to ask about the suspicious internet searches. The incident was investigated by Suffolk County Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Detectives and was determined to be non-criminal in nature.

Any further inquiries regarding this matter should be directed to the Suffolk County Police Department​

This should be a teachable moment to anyone who thinks that their workplace computers are somehow not being tracked.

And while Google itself, or a third party taking advantage of un-encrypted user activity, tracking user activity wasn’t the cause for this specific case, the fact that Google does comply with law enforcement to hand over data. Can law enforcement provide a search warrant to Google, and does Google comply with a request? Yes, and they publish the requests in a report every year — this is nothing new.

And, according to that transparency report, “widespread” requests, like the months of search history that would be needed to figure out the pressure cooker and backpack coincidence, often result in push to narrow.

But, according to an industry source, it doesn’t go the other way around i.e. Google isn’t flagging searches for “pressure + cooker” for police.

 

[Type Username Here]

Again Daze ignores that fact that the FBI already has confirmed someone from law enforcement visited the people in the article.

Disinformation at its finest.

 

[theworldismine13]

[URL='http://gawker.com/how-a-paranoid-blogger-made-everyone-scared-to-google-p-992804224']How A Paranoid Blogger Made Everyone Scared to Google Pressure Cookers

http://gawker.com/how-a-paranoid-blogger-made-everyone-scared-to-google-p-992804224?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_twitter&utm_source=gawker_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow[/URL]

 

[daze23]

Again Daze ignores that fact that the FBI already has confirmed someone from law enforcement visited the people in the article.

Disinformation at its finest.

Suffolk County has confirmed it was their officers, and that a former employer snitched

where's the "disinformation"?

 

[Type Username Here]

Suffolk County has confirmed it was their officers, and that a former employer snitched

where's the "disinformation"?

I wrote that before your last post. You kept posting articles that made it seem that no one visited them in regards to their search history. Obviously it now seems that it was due to a former employer having worries and not recent intelligence programs.

 

[ltheghost]

LOL the real government checked on them. Not the show government we all know about. The only thing they forgot to do was make them look into the light before they left.

 

[ltheghost]

brought to you by your liberal president.

Liberals are a disgraceful piece of sh!t

Whoa whoa!! LOL 9-11 happened under Bush's Watch...never forget 9-11!

 

[thernbroom]

If i lived in chicago i'd be doing this every day just to get some extra security for my journey to the mailbox

 

[¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

I wrote that before your last post. You kept posting articles that made it seem that no one visited them in regards to their search history. Obviously it now seems that it was due to a former employer having worries and not recent intelligence programs.