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Google Pressure Cookers and Backpacks: Get a Visit From the Feds
An anonymous reader writes "Massachusetts resident Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which raises the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?"
or similar
You really need to ask this question? Or you just playing stewpit?
Is it because the US government TLA brigade is staffed by hyper-paranoid assclowns that frequently drop the ball when it comes to making use of the illegal intelligence they happen upon?
I'm just glad the phrase "begs the question" wasn't used in this regard.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
If only we could get this Bush guy out of office this stuff wouldn't happen.
This raises another question. What happens when these people refuse to answer questions or allow a search of their home?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
but the United Stasi of American is not funny
We should all Google 'pressure cooker' and 'backpacks'. Let's send them for a spin.
It has been known for years that the NSA has a handle on all internet traffic, as well as cellular activities. They store it compile it, and if enough of it raises a red flag, some men in suits come to pay you a visit. Home of the free (to be spyed upon), Land of the brave (only once we have enough information on you).
42 69 6C 6C 20 47 61 74 65 73 20 69 73 20 61 20 77 68 6F 72 65 21
I guess we have no expectation of privacy when online.....
These are the times that try men's souls.
The Atlantic article is BAD. Not only is it a summary with no additional information (and information removed), but uses a bad and unrelated photograph!
Read the original article on Medium, and I strongly suggest that a Slashdot editor change the article link.
Although circumstantial, this implies one of two possibilities. Either Google is voluntarily looking for "suspicious" searches and reporting them to law enforcement, or law enforcement (using a warrant, a wiretap, a NSL, or similar) is either forcing Google to look for such suspicious searches or simply wiretapping Google.
Test your net with Netalyzr
The title has changed to "get a visit from the cops" since it was confirmed that it was the Long Island Task Force. However, the FBI was "aware of the operation".
I am sure they are aware, of a a lot more things. Damn pressure cooker backpacks...
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I'm just glad the phrase "begs the question" wasn't used in this regard.
This. Someone is learning.
Yeah, god forbid someone use proper english as she is spoke instead of obeying some retarded mistranslation of "seeking the principles".
They were visited by local police, not the feds. Bit of a difference.
Title needs updating, was local police, not Feds.
Even admitted in the article.
Everyone currently reading this article should expect a visit from the Federals*. Do not be alarmed citizen, remain calm and submit yourselves to your own protection.
Maybe overload is the only way to combat this sort of thing. Encourage all of your friends to search for pressure cookers and backpacks today.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Because they are not just looking at the metadata of what you search on the internet, they are looking at the content of those searches.
I use a gmail, so I figure google has tabs on what I email. it is interesting when I send a friend a chapter or short story I am working on and the ads I get after this...
That being said, will the feds come get me if I am sending a short story about an assassination?
A habit that I have gotten into a while back though, so as to not tie my searches in with my gmail, is that I use firefox for gmail and I use Opera in private browsing to search google. After reading this article, I realize that I am probably tracked via IP. This is disheartening.
It's time to invest in an anonymous proxy. I think I am going to start with this article then investigate further.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
$i = 0
while $i = 0
wget ”http://www.google.com/search?q=Pressure+Cooker"
wget ”http://www.google.com/search?q=backpack"
'Nuff Said
sudo make me a sandwich
Could well be their credit card company, flagging 2 purchases like these. Just like in that movie Seven where they know which library books you took out to figure out if you're a serial killer.
Could be google sure, but perhaps they were bragging about their purchases on Facebook/Twitter and someone reported them as dubious individuals.
I can't imagine how they'd ask at the door
"ma'am we're here to search the premises for backpacks and pressure cookers.. we're also calling in at the neighbours because they bought some bleach and soap from the local store".
Don't worry America, you're still free..
A coworker of mine is from Pakistan. His son ordered a detailed book on the engineering of the Boeing 777 airliner. Shortly thereafter two FBI agents came to his house to investigate. My coworker called his son down to meet them. When the agents found out he was 11 years old, they laughed, apologized and left.
This happened about three years ago.
Call it "Privacy At Home". Run a daemon on millions of devices that feeds the NSA line eater via Google queries. See the spook function
Yes, she admits to using Google ... but how do we know it wasn't Amazon, or some product review site that was giving the NSA the information? Or even Facebook, with all of the sites that end up linking back to them so you can 'like' their page.
Honestly, if I worked for the NSA, I'd start up my own ad network ... I assume the existing ones are profitable (or they wouldn't exist), so you can undercut them to get lots of sites to use your service, and randomly inject code into people's web browsers. Or just buy them outright. Or just usurp their business and have them do your dirty work for you without having to pay them.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Which raises the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?"
I, uh, don't really think we have all that much doubt about that one anymore.
As the better question - Do the wardens of our panopticon really consider the terrorists that stupid, that they would A) try the same attack again, and B) really need to Google the concept of a backpack?
I'm voting Obummer! I hear he's gonna bring us hope and change. He also says he will close Gitmo and end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The word of a Chicago politician is un-impugnable.
Oh, god. Now I really want to Google 'stewpit', but I'm worried it's some keyword for a terrorist cannibal org.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
It's not a mistranslation. "petitio" in latin means request. It's cognate with the english "petition". Begging is a request.
As for proper english as she is spoke, I don't see what sense of "beg" means the same as "raise". It *might* make sense if you anthropomorphise the question, and say that the question begs to be asked. But by normal rules of grammar the phrase "begging the question" clearly has the question as the subject, not the object of the begging.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You really need to ask this question? Or you just playing stewpit?
Honestly! Redundant questions like that really get me steamed up.
Even https://encrypted.google.com/ won't save you!
One of the big problems the EFF has had suing the NSA is that of "standing" - they have a hard time showing actual harm. This guy has standing to sue. He can show actual harm from unauthorized surveillance.
...we have a chap in a plexiglass dome, who listens and looks into everyone's home
-Dr Suess
This is proof we're still living in a free country! They didn't die in a hail of military-grade automatic weapons fire.
Let's see what happens.
She is a boingboing contributor which obviously explains why she is under surveillance. But honestly the medium.com piece seems like a nice bit of creative writing. Did her husband get any selfies with the feds?
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
...and since I have an interest in chemistry, I do a lot of Google searches about things that are mentioned in the show, such as the process of meth production and the precursors of meth production. I noticed Wikipedia has an article on meth production, not to mention alternative ways to produce precursors such as phenylacetone without getting the attention of the feds.
So why is it that I stand a better chance of getting a visit from the DEA than does Jimmy?
And no, I don't use Tor because I refuse to submit to a tyrannical government (at least not while I don't have an M-16 pointed at my face).
Oh, Jesus Christ, let it go already.
Your preferred assclown will be in power in another year or two and he can continue the egregious violation and erosion of our civil rights, what few we have left anyway.
It won't be any different, just the name will have changed. Get used to it.
Oh my god, the joint terrorism task force was in my house and there were dirty dishes in my sink!
This is just one more reason why you always refuse a search.
Which is being pointed out by others on twitter: Some random neighbor called in "these people are suspicious".
No comment yet reported from the local PD which sent the investigators.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Why is someone in the government so stupid as to think that googling for pressure cookers and backpacks would be terrorist activity? Maybe googling "backpack that can fit a pressure cooker filled with black powder", but even "backpack pressure cooker" isn't evil unless the chili you plan to bring to a cook-off is so spicy that it will kill someone with heart trouble.
In the middle of the article, you'll see that the husband also had trips to China and South Korea, so the trigger was more than just searching for backbacks and pressure cookers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is another reason why I hate the, "if you've nothing to hide" nonsense. In the past year, I've bought a pressure cooker, large capacity backpacks, fairly sizable quantities of pure sodium hydroxide (more, anyway, than one needs to unclog the drain), soldering irons and other equipment to work on electronics, numerous tanks of propane, gun powder, and we go to shops and run in social circles frequented by Arabic speakers. Why? Because, respectively, we (my wife and I) have a garden and can vegetables, we like to go hiking, we make our own soap and detergent, I like to fool around with electronics for fun, we use propane to heat our kettles while brewing beer, I hunt with a muzzle-loader, and as Orthodox Christians a great many of our coreligionists are Palestinian or Lebanese.
Of course the protectionist or supporter of the national security state will say, "See, you had nothing to hide. No big deal." But that's just the point. With enough information on people's activities, even the innocent ones can be construed as potentially dangerous. With enough information, anyone and everyone becomes a suspect. To say nothing of the fact that this subjects people to unreasonable searches, it lessens the chances of actually finding a legitimate focus for suspicion.
We may know that the government was doing.
But the government has still never answered that question.
And therein lies the problem, in our Republic, there is an expectation that we the people know how our government operates. We aren't necessarily entitled to all the governments information, but full and complete information oh how our government runs is something a "free" country would be expected to know in detail.
Your preferred assclown will be in power in another year or two
I don't vote Republocrat. So it's doubtful that "my preferred assclown" will make it in.
Oh, god. Now I really want to Google 'stewpit', but I'm worried it's some keyword for a terrorist cannibal org.
stewpit izahz stewpit das....
Now we have had various ample proof that parts of the government are exceeding their power, that they are literally breaking laws, and even the checks and balances of our system do nothing to detect and correct, often times due to collusion or tacit approval . We have whistleblowers pointing out these abuses, and they're to be prosecuted, and while people may cheer for them and call them heroes, little else seems to be happening. There are more protests and support rallies for these folks in foreign lands than here in the US.
It's not even complex: Parts of the government have been knowingly breaking the laws that they themselves were supposed to protect and enforce, yet they have not been put in jail, or even brought to trial. Nothing appears like it will change.
I hate to sound all tin-foil-hat-infowars-crazy, but at the point where the government decides it doesn't have to follow the law, and can do anything it wants - without even a hand-waving distraction, it's not a democracy or republic - it's authoritarian leaning towards totalitarianism. Laws were broken. Someone, perhaps whole groups of someone, need to go to jail. Claiming that it's okay because a law is open to interpretation, without question, by a government body not privileged with the power of interpreting law, and then further masking it with secrecy in part to hide the legality is right out! That's not a senate committee issue. It's black and white - trial time. If the president says he knew and explicitly approved, it's also impeachment time, followed by jail time. This isn't getting a hummer in the oval office level stuff, this is beyond Nixon-level stuff.
People turned out in the thousands for the OWS, and they didn't even have a good argument, much less any sort of attempt at a solution. Where are the thousands for this?
50 civilians are killed by drones for every terrorist. I suppose that at least same amount of false positives will go for the information gathered by the government's data snooping operations, but with far more hits as there is a lot of information gathered. And those false positives effect could go to just stipping you of any privacy left, no matter if you are an US citizen, to get visit from the Feds, to "dissapear". Don't be afraid just of the Big Brother, now the Texas sharpshooters will be in your next nightmare.
Missing from the summary, of course, is that the family had a son who has actually clicked on a link to an artlcle on how to make a pressure cooker bomb.
"But my son’s reading habits combined with my search for a pressure cooker and my husband’s search for a backpack set off an alarm of sorts at the joint terrorism task force headquarters."
Google may not have been involved at all here. All the investigators needed were the logs for the website hosting the offending article, and a cooperating ISP, to find that family.
It's not any good. Google doesn't even have a truly working syntax, any more. You can try and force specific phrase searches all you want and the "AI" or whatever they're using goes out and grabs "similar" terms anyways, to add unnecessary things to your results. You can exclude certain phrases or words all you want BUT if they are one of the "similar" terms to something else you're searching for, they will still show up. Google is totally broken with all of its "smart"-ness!
Meanwhile, this "smart" searching is backed by loads and loads of monitoring. There's I guess what we could call "passive" monitoring, where complete search phrases are stored and used to create some kind of "likelihood" for the sake of "quick searching", where search results are provided for you in a drop-down menu below the text input control on the search page.
But that "quick searching" means there's what we could call an "active" monitoring, where every keypress you enter is being sent to the server that responds with likely search terms based on that database.
So not only is it kind of broken, but it's also kind of Orwellian.
And I thought Google was already on the list of evil corporations that are stealing our privacy and handing it to whatever despots make a demand. So why don't news articles continue that rhetoric instead of sounding so aghast that this company that has been mined for data by the feds in the past is potentially creepy?
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
How'd the government know what they were Googling?"
Boyoboy - that's an old story, they.... - every search, chat, email and what else have you is scanned. ISP's are hit for their cert's master keys and over 50 % of reps in Congress support that shit.
Are there any significant numbers of people bothered by that? Nope - it's for your security. (greatest brainwash success)
The post is naive, there is more to come, fear, mistakenly taken and arrested as a "terrorist". All in a "free country" with a constitution "by the people, for the people"... sickening.
The fact that you think a third party or anyone on that ballot isn't controlled by the same puppeteers goes to show that you still don't have a clue.
Well I'm sure they only knew about their web searches because they had obtained a specific warrant to monitor the couple after a judge agreed there was probable cause to do so. Right?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
These are soldiers. It's time to start calling them what they are. The only reason they wear para military uniforms is to intimidate you. Camouflage is the new red.
You people really have too much time on your hands.
They're ALL Assclowns. And once they get inside the Beltway, the notional difference between Brand D and Brand R tends to fuzz out.
I like my plan, better: All Elected Officials serve two terms: the first in office, and the second in jail, based on what they did during the first. And no "country club prisons. . . "
I thought the NSA just stores metadata, and will only inspect the contents of our transactions once there is a reasonable threat? Surely the government wouldn't lie to us!
By which I mean the NSA/FBI/whatever.
I love the question they apparently asked: "Do you have any bombs?" Seriously? They expect people to answer that in any useful way rather than laughing at it?
"Why, yes, I'm a chemist and we use them all the time at work."
I'm sure that joke would go over badly. I'm not even sure if it's safe for me to make a joke about the fact that there are indeed valid homonyms for "bomb", given slashdot forums are probably regularly scanned. AC comments probably mark this of greater interest in some stupid NSA threat scoring system too.
They come back a few hours later with a no knock search warrant that was rubber stamped by a judge in a court you're not allowed to know about. They then shoot your dog, tear apart your home and vehicles, and likely have all your assets frozen.
Just a one-word omission:
...begs [for] the question...
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Um. No.
Hitting the dog -> the dog is the one being hit.
Begging the question -> the question is the on being begged.
that is very scary. guess the US Constitution will need to add a new amendment "the rights to Freedom of Search" :)
The questions are indeed redundant, but you don't explain how.
If the first question is answered Yes (you need to ask), then obviously the answer to the second question can only be No (not playing stupid, but really are stupid).
If the first question is answered No (no need to ask), then obviously the answer to the second question can only be Yes (playing stupid, because I am smart enough to already know the answer and didn't need to ask).
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
So on NPR just this morning they were interviewing the head of one of those oversight or committees and he was all about how snowden was wrong about the scope and what was reported is way more info than they really collect. It's just the metadata - he had to point out the oddness of the word metadata probably to make people think about it and get confused. So we continue to learn new things: 1) what snowden said about domestic data collection 2) he's proof that they don't have protections against misuse of the data and 3) we can't trust the authorities to tell us what's going on (as evidenced by TFA here contrasted with said NPR interview) because they actively lie about it to the public and the rest of the government.
Have gnu, will travel.
Which raises the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?"
NO! That should be "Which begs the question..."
How are we supposed to mock your incorrect use of the phrase if you don't even use it!
First, I'd call the police. They should have no objection to that since they at least claim to be there legally. Calling the police is a good way protect your self from people impersonating officers.
Then I'd ask to see their warrant.
Then finally I'd respond to their request to come in. I'd respond with no, I will not invite them in. If you invite them in, they can do a search that extends beyond their warrant. Of course, you don't physically prevent their entering: if they have a warrant, they don't need your permission to enter, and you arn't allowed to stop them, simply decline any requests for additional rights on their part.
Be sure to carefully watch what they do, and ideally record it, preferably video with audio so you can sue for damages if their search extents beyond what is legally allowed, and to also defend yourself in court if they attempt to claim you behaved improperly.
Google NSA's "Echelon" and CARNIVORE. Not too many years ago the NSA were already world wide web levels of notorious for claims that they were monitoring every single cell phone and internet communication, of domestic and unsuspicious Americans, and that those communications were being converted into text by computer, and that the text was being scanned for keywords.
The process involved searching texts or textualized conversions of voice data, for National Security-sensitive keywords like "bomb", "assassinate", "president", and so on. Then these texts were made all lower-case except for the keywords being upper-case (or something like that, who cares) and they were stored and the keywords were tagged onto the files.
Based on how "weighty" the communication appeared to be -- which was calculated using some telemetrics involving the parties involved, the subjects involved, the timing, and the number of keyword phrases included -- the text might be "flagged" and this might get a person watched by the NSA.
So, there was this huge backlash that used the internet to spread the word about Echelon and CARNIVORE and to create support for a movement against it.
The idea was that people would post an overload of messages with keywords in them like "BOMB", "ASSASSINATE", and "PRESIDENT", for the purpose of creating needless and indeed (given that the authors had no motive of making a bomb, or assassinating anyone, let alone the President) senseless work for the CARNIVORE system to churn through.
I can't remember what such buzzword-loaded messages were called. Carnivore Bombs? Something like that?
Anyways, WHERE THE FUCK is all of that historical context when Slashdot authors post new shit or comment on shit about the NSA?
Where your head at?
I'm not upset that this isn't "NEWS". In the strictest sense, the NSA watching *everything you say* isn't news unless you count things that were apparent over ten years ago. But that's not what's upsetting me, right now. Not slashdot's tendency to feature content not quite "news"-worthy, at all.
Instead, I'm upset that the people who submit and comment either have some kind of inability to connect historical events together and keep a relatively sane sense of the importance and relevance and other things that are really REALLY freaking important when you're critically analyzing a situation, or, they're all simply too young.
Too bad there's not a way to realistically age-filter submissions and comments because frankly anything anybody under 25 has to tell me about the NSA is "cool-talk" that has more to do with posturing and meeting some weirded-out hipster status-quo than anything to do with speculation on directions our country is headed, privacy, etc.
It's like the people who, twenty years ago, were still angrily shouting down and taunting anybody who mentioned the "NSA" as paranoid, crazy, schio, etc. ... are today just keeping a low profile and towing the "hip talk" line. Even if not the same individuals, the same personality profile.
They really secretly are like "this is bullshit, this doesn't exist, people who think like this should be zombified and marched into a large oven", but because it's "hip" subject material, they don't really put any thought behind it but hit the "submit" button and are like "hope nobody notices I think they're all batshit crazy."
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
This monitoring is being likened to wiretapping which is incorrect.
It would be like wiretapping if they were monitoring communication from one machine or site to another. This is more pernicious. They are tapping your email no matter who you send it to. This means that if you are a customer of a particular ISP and send an email to another customer of that ISP, even in the same neighbourhood, your emails are monitored but not through watching what transpires between the mail servers since you're more than likely on the same mail server. This means that the ISP has been directed to send copies of all emails to the NSA regardless of whether they have travelled from that ISP's mail servers to another mail server or stayed completely within the customer's ISP mail servers.
Does this extend to a company's intra-email servers? IF I had a small company with only a few employees but providing them with intra office email would I also have to send copies of that intra-office traffic to the NSA? Would the fact that I had my own mail server to keep the company internal emails private label me and my company as a possible terrorist cell? VERY LIKELY on all counts.
It's been said that the people shouldn't be afraid of their government but that the government should be afraid of the people. Well, as far as I can see, the American government is terrified of the American people otherwise they wouldn't feel they had to collect all this information, break in on people making purchasing searches for pressure cookers and force ISPs all over the country to send copies of all their emails and web searches to the NSA. The threat from terrorists is negligible compared to the threat of the government misinterpreting otherwise innocent activities by innocent citizens.
That their SON was looking up bomb making information.
FUD about google searches, but what about the site that their SON landed on that had bomb making information on it?
None of which is grounds for visits from the Feds
So you honestly think that no-one at all should pay attention to a person who:
A) Searches for pressure cookers
B) Searches for backpacks
C) Searches for how to make bombs from pressure cookers (read the article)
D) Has a number of visits to China/South Korea (which borders another country you may have heard of).
The feds are rightfully being criticized for not scooping up the Boston bombers when they had enough information beforehand they might be a problem. Here they are obviously closing some barn doors after multiple horses are left, but I wouldn't rule out copycat bombings - would you? Just going around asking questions of a few people could prevent that.
Heck, I'm not even saying it's right to gather the search data (it's not at all). but given that they DO, that they have this information, given all that and the above criteria coming from one house - they would be remiss in NOT asking them questions. Why the hell are you and others so afraid of simply being asked questions? If they had come to my house when I was younger (and they sure would have based on what I would have been searching for) I would have happily talked to them for a while and thought it was amusing myself. Your freak-out is entirely unwarranted.
Besides, it's what you and others voted for when you voted for Obama (I myself voted libertarian). So really you come off as pretty hypocritical whining about this.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How about BEGETS the question?
Evokes the question.
Implies the question.
Insinuates the question.
Induces the question.
Leads to the question.
Prompts the question.
Suggests the question.
Spawns the question.
You're doing it wrong.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
It probably was a honeypot of some kind. The feds more than likely put up fake sites with all kinds of anarchist information (most of it edited to be wrong or missing critical pieces to make actual working devices), get it into search engines, and investigate visitors.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
We aren't necessarily entitled to all the governments information, but full and complete information oh how our government runs is something a "free" country would be expected to know in detail.
[LarryTheCableGuy]
Well, there's your doggone problem, right there!
[/LarryTheCableGuy]
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
They should sue the government in civil court for emotional distress.
Remember the "terrorist hate our freedom" statement.... now the government hates it too! We must end the this threat of freedom, freedom kills! Pipe bomb. Yellow cake. White House. Blue House. Potato.
There's no actual information as to why.
Just people jumping to uninformed conclusions.
Google doesn't even have a truly working syntax, any more. You can try and force specific phrase searches all you want and the "AI" or whatever they're using goes out and grabs "similar" terms anyways, to add unnecessary things to your results. You can exclude certain phrases or words all you want BUT if they are one of the "similar" terms to something else you're searching for, they will still show up. Google is totally broken with all of its "smart"-ness!
This is not entirely true. On a search results page, you can click on "Search Tools" and then change the middle dropdown from "All Results" to "Verbatim". This makes Google work much the way it used to in the Good Old Days(tm).
Please let Timmy be on staff at the time, Please let Timmy be on staff at the time, Please let Timmy...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Missing from the summary, of course, is that the family had a son who has actually clicked on a link to an artlcle on how to make a pressure cooker bomb.
FFS man, I bet you couldn't follow a recipe if it had four ingredients and three steps.
You might just read a CNN piece about how bomb making instructions are readily available on the internet and you will in all probability, if you are that kid, click the link provided.
Which might not raise any red flags. Because who wasn't reading those stories? Who wasn't clicking those links? But my son's reading habits combined with my search for a pressure cooker and my husband's search for a backpack set off an alarm of sorts at the joint terrorism task force headquarters.
That's how I imagine it played out, anyhow. Lots of bells and whistles and a crowd of task force workers huddled around a computer screen looking at our Google history.
It's like you intentionally went out of your way to strip out the context.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I'd like to know if this is really true or are they making it up?
Could just be attention-whoring.
It's not like the FBI is going to confirm or deny any of these stories.
The subplot about the son is missing not just from the summary, but from The Atlantic article as well.
Where did you get this quote? Or are you just trolling?
But, that won't happen. Why do people keep denying that we're living in a police state? When do we officially have fascism?
All google Pressure Cookers and Backpacks through TOR!
A former buddy of mine at 'the fort' (cough) once said information wants to be free.
Having worked not soley at the fort (like my buddy) but at SV companies to launching rockets, I found that his assertion was not true, but that information wants to be exploited. It's already free if you search "the right way" (as mentioned by another buddy at the 'other' agency).
Hence, How'd the government know what they were Googling?"
Easy. Just like every other company that does ads, they buy the info from Google.
Of course, once weak selectors have triggered from the google data, the gov't has other systems (e.g. let's say telco info) to get the location and possibly user of the IP address that google recorded. It's what's been known in all market analysis and the hollywood industry for awhile: federated metadata search. Big Data Analytics is the buzz word for it nowadays. Nothing new here.
Now what do we get out of this? That being anonymous is NOT anonymous anymore. We've hit the Uncertainty Principle in information sharing: if you touch "the system", you're identified. Period. Much like if you measure it, you effect the results. So to the tinfoil hat folks, either stay under your rock or quit complaining and 'work' the system (aka opt in or opt out).
Lastly, the Gov't takes actions that are threatening, where as the credit card companies do the exact same pattern matching, and take similar actions, of course less threatening to you by context. Think about it and you'd be more surprised if the gov't wasn't doing this in the 1st place.
Which means GP's argument that "begging the question" was "proper english" doesn't apply either. If it's plain english, then the formal logic sense of the term wins because of the argument I detailed above. If it's a figure of speech, then the formal logic sense of the term wins because of seniority AND utility
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
...please buy your stuff online or we're doomed. The NSA just leaves the office if the system flags you.
NSA must be abolished and its leaders as well as Obabush prosecuted at the international court.
This always means "I beg you to stop proving me wrong". No exceptions.
Back in 2006, I had just bought a new DSLR camera and went out taking photos. This included stepping out of my car at a mall and taking some photos. The next morning the cops (don't remember their affiliation) showed up at my door with a folder full of info on me. They said that someone had reported that a brown man (I'm of Indian origin) had a car (they took down my license plate) with a camera mount and I was going around taking pictures of buildings.
They told me that they had gone around my house and looked in through the windows and seen a RC plane (I was into those at the time). They wanted to know what the range was and what I did with it.
They asked a few questions and left.
It's Osama celebrating his victory.
Yeah it wasn't the feds. 10 to 1 ISP's in Boston are flagging those terms when they come through.
Seriously. What is everyone so afraid of?
Exactly how many Americans have been killed by terrorism total, in all of human history?
Now... okay, you got that number firmly in your head?
Exactly how many innocent Americans have been killed by POLICE, even as accidents, since we started allowing the police to carry guns?
I think that number will surprise you, because the odds are; you're far more likely to be killed by a member of law enforcement, than you are by a terrorist. Far, far, far more likely.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Do the wardens of our panopticon really consider the terrorists that stupid, that they would A) try the same attack again, and B) really need to Google the concept of a backpack?
That's the problem. One of the truisms in the armed forces is that the generals are always fighting the last war. Similarly, our anti-terrorism forces are always trying to prevent the last attack. Thanks to the Unabomber, we still can't mail packages bigger than 16 ounces unless we do it in person. Thanks to the shoe-bomber, we have to take off our shoes when we go through the metal detector at the airport. Now we can't Google for pressure cookers and backpacks. Fer Crissakes.
God forbid that some clever terrorists decide to Google for suspicious terms, with the intent of luring anti-terrorism forces into an ambush. I wonder how our somewhat dim and reactionary anti-terrorism forces would deal with that. Good thing that the average jihadist is too stupid to play that type of chess.
And to think I was turned down for an Army info-sec position...I have exactly the sort of devious mind it takes to stay several steps ahead of the bad guys. Sadly, they prefer people with "N years of experience in this field, N years of experience in that field"...sigh.
And the worst thing about this...it means that the terrorists have won. They never claimed to be able to destroy our country, or overwhelm us in a military sense...they said they wanted to destroy our way of life. Well, our freedom has been replaced with a paranoid, reactionary, technologically-supercharged fascist surveillance state. The terrorists didn't even have to impose it; the western world imposed it on themselves. Somewhere, two guys with a lot of Mohammeds in their name are toasting the defeat of their enemy.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
Or you just playing stewpit?
Just don't do it with a backpack.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
"The offending article"... that phrase actually makes me shudder a bit. It comes dangerously close to "the illegal information" which is itself dangerously close to "the dangerous thought". I am not a paranoid anti-big brother tin foil hat wearer, but this is getting ridiculous and downright scary.
Take a look at the picture in the article and compare it with the actual description of what happened;
Six gentleman in casual clothes emerged from the vehicles and spread out as they walked toward the house, two toward the backyard on one side, two on the other side, two toward the front door.
There was no assault team. The wife and children were not present. The picture make it look like the police terrorized an innocent family when the truth is far different.
I hate inflammatory reporting and this is a prime example of it. The story is bad enough as it is without adding falsehoods.
Which is what I don't understand. Why is that necessary? Is the existence of blatantly unconstitutional practices not harm enough for them, or do they like giving the government yet another reason to keep everything secret?
Unfortunately, our system isn't based on common sense, or even passing the giggle test. All our system offers is the chance to take them to court. And our courts aren't impartial arbiters of facts; a trial is more like a poorly-produced stage play.
But this is supposed to be better than the alternative.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
I have access to several thousand computers.
here 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, Try again.
Of course they do, that's why they are commenting on Slashdot.
But he has a Constitutional right to be a boingboing contributor without being summarily executed by overzealous police.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
Gen. Keith Alexander? Is that you?
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
Why don't we have software that occasionally randomly googles things?
Like... "bomb making", "nitroglycerin" and "TNT"!
either stay under your rock or quit complaining and 'work' the system (aka opt in or opt out).
If by rock, you mean encrypt and obfuscate all of your communications, then yeah, that's already happening via TOR and other such services. And I'm going to bet that there'll be more of this in the coming future. Much more.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
This is another reason why I hate the, "if you've nothing to hide" nonsense.
I certainly have something to hide from the NYPD cannibal cop that abused a restricted law-enforcement database.
I have nothing to hide from a just government, but we don't have one of those, given that it's comprised of people. Our Founding Fathers knew that, and tried to write a Constitution forming a government with limited powers.
Legalize the Constitution!
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
That's absolutely correct, but it doesn't make it the subject. Hitting the dog is not a full sentence. You're hitting the dog is. In this case, you is the subject, the dog is the object. Similarly, begging the question is not a sentence. It is begging the question is. It is the subject, the question is the object and would need to be not inanimate to work.
So you can still be clean after the dollar is completely debased and civilization collapses?
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
I am guessing that the fact I am browsing (and posting) on this thread, I will get a visit from the po-po.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
...FOILED by PRISM. Nice work boys.
I for one love Big Brother.
Meanwhile, the real terrorists just go to their local WalMart, buy a backpack and a pressure cooker for cash, and are on their way. Hell, they could probably buy a shopping cart full of shotgun shells to get the powder out of while they're at it.
The police didn't intercept her Google searches.
She posted pictures of M-66 explosives publicly on her Facebook account.
Google Plus posting on the topic
The facebook photo in question
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
JTTF denies it. FBI denied it was involved but said it was Nassau and Suffolk county police, but Nassau has denied involvement and Suffolk is trying to confirm that they were not involved (I'm guessing they don't want to say they weren't involved and later have to recant). It's peculiar at best:
http://gothamist.com/2013/08/01/li_woman_says_she_was_investigated.php
No need to google it per se. The NSA logs *all* your traffic
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
That is why I use https://startpage.com/
But wouldn't they need to have said "proper english [grammar]" rather than just "proper english"? I would interpret "proper english" to also include well established idiomatic expressions.
And I don't think it will *matter* if the clown is a donkey or elephant. Both parties have dirty hands on this issue while both claim the moral high ground. Politics as usual...
Which is a good reason to use proxies.
The blog does NOT say the son searched for instructions on how to build a bomb. Here it is:
"
Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in âoethese timesâ now. And in these times, when things like the Boston bombing happen, you spend a lot of time on the internet reading about it and, if you are my exceedingly curious news junkie of a twenty-year-old son, you click a lot of links when you read the myriad of stories. You might just read a CNN piece about how bomb making instructions are readily available on the internet and you will in all probability, if you are that kid, click the link provided.
Which might not raise any red flags. Because who wasnâ(TM)t reading those stories? Who wasnâ(TM)t clicking those links? But my son's reading habits combined with my search for a pressure cooker and my husbandâ(TM)s search for a backpack set off an alarm of sorts at the joint terrorism task force headquarters.
Thatâ(TM)s how I imagine it played out, anyhow. Lots of bells and whistles and a crowd of task force workers huddled around a computer screen looking at our Google history.
"
She assumes her son could have clicked on a link. But she does *not* say he did, contrary to your claim.
everyone in the US google "pressure cookers" and "backpacks". That should take care of it.
That's absolutely correct, but it doesn't make it the subject. Hitting the dog is not a full sentence. You're hitting the dog is. In this case, you is the subject, the dog is the object. Similarly, begging the question is not a sentence. It is begging the question is. It is the subject, the question is the object and would need to be not inanimate to work.
So if begging the question is not a sentence but it is begging the question is a sentence, does that mean if I say you are using it is begging the question wrong am I wrong if I say it like it is wrong to beg the question is wrong to say?
She posted public photos of explosives to her facebook a couple weeks before the cops showed up and tried to construe it as the feds watching her Google search according to a cnet correspondent: https://plus.google.com/112961607570158342254/posts/FWAVRVaN64h?e=-RedirectToSandbox
Last I checked there is no expectation of privacy when you post facebook photos as public.
And you can forget about offshore proxies, VPNs, or any other anonymizing gimmick, the USA owns you from the ISP connection. So unless you're wardriving from a network of stealthy, untraceable, home-built, solar powered, Helium buoyant UAVs relaying encrypted web traffic back and forth from your undisclosed lair, you're SOL even if you just want to make soap in your own kitchen.
Disclaimer: I neither confirm nor deny the possibilty that I am wardriving right now from a network of stealthy, untraceable, home-built, solar powered, Helium buoyant UAVs
Funny, but I think you are right. Limit all members of congress to a maximum of 2 terms. You could serve 2 terms in the house or 2 terms in the Senate, followed by two terms as president. Maximum of 20 years total (2 in the Senate and 2 as president).
As the saying goes.... Politicians and diapers should be changed often, and for the same reason....
I like my plan, better: All Elected Officials serve two terms: the first in office, and the second in jail, based on what they did during the first. And no "country club prisons. . . "
That's pretty much what happens in pseudo-deomcracies that are still mostly controlled by the rule of man instead of the rule of law. For example, the phillippines and pakistan.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Please explain how traveling to China and South Korea (the latter of which is a protected ally) constitute any reason for suspicion.
Please help metamoderate.
We have that already: we call it the Govenor's office in Illinois.
... it's here.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Let's all google a bunch of likely keywords, just so we can meet these guys...
Jack bauer wannabees admitting they do this all the time and 99% of the time they find nothing seems to be an indication of extreme paranoia, waste of taxpayer funds and fishing expeditions based on fruits of mass surveillance.
Remember kids never consent to warantless search, never answer questions without a lawyer. There is no need to be a jackass about it however taking path of least resistance only serves to legitimize and normalize illegitimate behavior.
Man, you're begging the question of the likelihood of someone misusing "begging the question"? That's meta, even for /.
This could never happen in a democracy. Shame on America.
Yeah surely no one has thought of that! Oh how did you sign up for that proxy btw? How did they give you the IP? Wait - through the internet? Don't worry, the NSA knows which proxy(ies) you are using too. It's trivial to do when you essentially have ALL the data.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Except the article points our massachusetts
then switches to long island
I smell BS here
wait, did i read an onion article?
I can't believe that nobody has linked this yet:
What's the worst thing that can happen if you misuse a pressure cooker in an ordinary kitchen?
Begging the question as a term of logic IS a well established idiomatic expression. It predates, and is more useful, than a synonym for "raises the question".
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Come on, just pack it in now.
Regards, Phil
> The statement "changing the puppet doesn't change the puppeteer" implies without question that the president is a puppet.
There is a specific term for assuming the answer to an important question. That term is "begging the question" and it will normally be found on any list of logical fallacies.
You're thinking of "raises the question". Begging the assumes the answer, raising the question asks for an answer.
I knew I liked you, DickBreath.
You're also the guy who understands the difference between "could care less" and "couldn't care less" and more importantly, which one is correct when indicating an absolute lack of giving any amount of shit whatsoever.
Have a nice day!
Beware of the Leopard.
Now I really want to Google 'stewpit', but I'm worried it's some keyword for a terrorist cannibal org.
I know you meant this as a joke, but the underlying punchline isn't funny.
Are we reaching a point where people will begin self-censorship? Where we will curtail our own curiosity even in the privacy of our own homes because even there Big Brother is listening to make sure we're not a threat to the State?
Well... were they terrorists or not?
The reason "beg" is the correct word is that "beg" means ask for something unearned. Begging the question means "asking your opponent to validate your unsubstantiated premise" So you are begging for the question to be validated. But, as said elsewhere, idioms do not generally follow strict grammatical rules, nor do they need to. So it's all moot.
Learn to love Alaska
There is no requirement in a republic that the people be informed. You elect people to be informed for you, how they do so (so long as they do so) is not your concern. Now, if we had a direct democracy, you'd have a point. We don't.
Learn to love Alaska
This begs the question, "why wasn't that phrase used?"
> . The statement changing the puppet doesn't change the puppeteer" implies without question that the president is a puppet.
...". You're begging the audience to overlook your unwarranted and important assumption.
That does assume, and there is a specific term for a assuming the answer to an important question. That term is "begging the question". It will be found on most lists of logical fallacies.
you are thinking of "raises the question". Raising the question ask for an answer. Begging the question assumes the answer. The word begging is used in the sense of "humor me for a moment and assume
He was being sarcastic...since the NSA claimed not to be spying on Americans...
Why go through FISA? It's not like the couple who were Googling got an NSL. The point would be to bring a complaint in an open court that FISA courts are unconstitutional. At least that is what I would think the goal should be. It also seems to me, that if the FBI acted on a FISA warrant, they made the information public and would (well, should) lose attempts at suppressing it -- at least with regards to evidence pertaining to this particular case.
"Which means GP's argument that "begging the question" was "proper english" doesn't apply either."
I certainly don't want to get into an argument over whether figures of speech are "proper English". I don't think that's a debate anybody can win definitively.
but full and complete information oh how our government runs is something a "free" country would be expected to know in detail.
Didn't you get the memo? On Sept 11th 2001 the US stopped being a "free" country and is now a "safe" country.
So shut up about your worthless "freedom" and "constitution" and "rights" you terrorist defending traitor!
Fuck, you're stupid. Never heard of end to end encryption or VPN, eh?
Who do you think set up the proxies?
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
I know you meant this as a joke, but the underlying punchline isn't funny.
It wasn't particularly funny 40 years ago either, but that didn't keep it from being a fairly common joke:
I think the major change is that we communicate in more ways than just the telephone nowadays, and the technical means to monitor those communications has gotten more pervasive and sophisticated... so more of our privacy is exposed.
Yeah. I'm not laughing either.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
It was probably a rhetorical question. But they are usually followed by more discussion from the person stating it...
Your good at grammer.
What search engine did they use to search for pressure cookers and backpacks?
AccountKiller
I just Googled pressure cooker and backpacks....i wonder if the feds come, if they do, im going to point them to this article.
This is not new.
http://slashdot.org/story/99/10/18/1419245/october-21-is-jam-echelon-day
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
it's a saying so it doesn't matter one flying fuck what is correct, what matters is that some people are using it, so you 'all bette stfu and get back to the issue at stake.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Bullshit. Or republic was founded by the people. The fact that it is not direct democracy does not mean that they get to pass laws that govern us that we cannot see or execute them in a way that is secret. That is wrong no matter what.
Yeah, I got the memo, but too much of it was redacted to know what it said.... ;-)
Probably not BS. This sounds real. But the Slashdot blurbist got it wrong. The picture, which was a file photo, had been taken in Massachusetts. The family whose home was searched because they googled the wrong domestic products was in New York (Nassau County).
In ancient Rome, when officials of particular offices ended their term, there was an automated trial. In the trial, the opposition - not the state - would demand accountability for performance and expenses. Even more so, the trials weren't "innocent until proven guilty" but quite the opposite: The official that couldn't provide concrete evidence that show his conduct was good, was automatically judged as guilty.
And the judges? Separate elections.
This standard of accountability was so pervasive in the area, that the Greeks would often elect outsiders from the cities to arbitrate and reform their government just so the ensuing allegation following the end-of-term won't deteriorate into a civil war.
Oh, and did I mention this all happened during war time? People didn't buy in into the whole the safety of the nation bull. If at a time of war someone decided to assume power not meant for him, they'd have his head. The only shifts in power were at the end of long civil wars and gradual changes in demographics during times of peace.
So yeah, I all for your plan.
If she is a Mass. resident why is she getting visited at home by county coppers from New York?
A former buddy of mine at 'the fort' (cough) once said information wants to be free.
Having worked not soley at the fort (like my buddy) but at SV companies to launching rockets, I found that his assertion was not true, but that information wants to be exploited. It's already free if you search "the right way" (as mentioned by another buddy at the 'other' agency).
Hence, How'd the government know what they were Googling?"
Easy. Just like every other company that does ads, they buy the info from Google.
Google is not in the business of selling your personal information. They are in the business of selling ads targeted based on your personal information.
Which does not mean the three letter agency of your choice does not get access to what they want, but that's an entirely different matter.
You need a top secret security clearance with the un to know that answer.
The phrase "begging bread" goes back at least as far as the Authorised Version of the Bible (1611), and "bread" is clearly the object in "I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread". Is this an exceptional use?
I'm just glad the phrase "begs the question" wasn't used in this regard.
I'm just glad the phrase "in this regard" wasn't used in this regard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference#Probability_of_a_hypothesis
Because there is only an extreme small percentage of $BADGUYS, a test on gathered info must be extreeeemly selective and sensitive to produce usable results.
You'd think they should have figured that out by now themselves
May I suggest we all go back to Sortition-government by elected officials chosen by lottery?
When I was there they were fanboying Obama harder than anyone in the US ever did. I didn't know it at the time, but they even named a MOUNTAIN after him (nevermind all the unlicensed goods stamped with his face.)
What did they get in return for that? Economic abuse which resulted in the WTO agreeing their complaint was valid and granting them an exemption to respecting US IP and trade laws, since we'd been effectively doing the same to them for quite a while.
What exactly were they fanboying, if the president didn't even ensure fair and just trade with one of it's least threatening trade partners?
1: It's cheap. Like than $0.50 a bar cheap, even cheaper (by about half) if you don't scent it.
2: It's higher-quality. EVERY inexpensive soap you can get on the market has had all of the glycerine removed. Soap that hasn't had it removed (or has had it added back in) costs about $4+/bar.
3: It's better for your skin. The aforementioned glycerine is a natural humectant; a properly-crafted glycerine soap won't dry out your skin no matter how much you use it, within reason, particularly if you superfat it by about 3% with olive oil or similar.
4: It's infinitely customizeable. You can pretty much make exactly what you want.
5: It's fun! You get to play with organic chemistry in your home while crafting useful items!
As a user of Adblocker plus I get almost zero ads.
They are sending armed men into an unknown situation. From the article and blog it seems the authorities did very little pre-planning. They did not seem to know how many people were in the house, general layout of the house, etc. All of this is very poor tactical planning and just asking for something bad to happen. I can see hundreds of ways this could go sideways. What if little Johnny comes bounding out of the back room to play cops and robbers, blammo. What if you have a dog that does not like strangers, blammo. The list can just go on and on. Poor planning leads to piss poor performance. I guess all of this would take work and work is hard.
I spoke with a friend in the FBI and he said good old fashioned detective work is passe. The days of getting a lead, developing a snitch, doing a thorough investigation and then getting a warrant to execute a well planned raid are gone. Why go to all that work when you can just sit back in the office entering search terms and sending the local cops to do the hard work. If it doesn't pan out, no skin off your ass, just try again.
Just like every other company that does ads, they buy the info from Google.
Google doesn't sell data. Not to advertisers, not to anyone. The only exception is market research data which is aggregated and anonymized and cannot be used to target specific individuals.
Of course, once weak selectors have triggered from the google data, the gov't has other systems (e.g. let's say telco info) to get the location and possibly user of the IP address that google recorded.
I strongly doubt that Google was involved at all. I see two realistic possibilities:
1. The supposition that the content of a Google search was involved at all is simply false. The visit was provoked by something else, and the targets just assumed it was related to Google queries.
2. The search was done over HTTP, and the connection was intercepted at the ISP or any other point in the chain between browser and Google.
That's pretty much it. Google says it doesn't supply data to the government without lawful orders, and that it doesn't supply broad data at all, only specific data about specific individuals given specific legal documentation. You may not believe it, but there's really no evidence otherwise. As a Google employee with some visibility into relevant infrastructure, I have evidence to support it.
Call me a shill, naive, whatever. This is just my honest, and fairly well-informed, opinion.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
What a refreshingly fresh idea!
The entire social (governing) contract is based on the consent of the governed. We cannot consent to what we cannot know.
Which raises the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?"
Actually, for me it raises the question "How do you know they were visited because of what they Googled?" As far as I can tell we've only got one side of the story here.
Here's a quote from the article (emphasis mine):
Or perhaps the NSA, as part of its routine collection of as much internet traffic as it can, automatically flags things like Google searches for "pressure cooker" and "backpack" and passes on anything it finds to the FBI.
Or maybe it was something else.
Yes, maybe it was something else. Unfortunately "something else" wouldn't be as sexy a story right now, would it? Maybe - and to be honest, this seems like a simpler explanation to me - they were visited for an entirely different reason - legitimate or not - and a) this is the best guess the people concerned have as to why they were visited or b) they are actually hiding something else.
The use of the outrageously sensationalist photo accompanying the story - actually taken from when they were doing door-to-door sweeps after the Boston bombings and unrelated to the story in question - is a pretty shitty and seemingly biased piece of journalism on its own (there's no caption; it's only explained in the middle of a paragraph further down the story) and enough for me to have serious doubts about the accuracy and impartiality of the piece.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
You people really have too much time on your hands.
No silly, they're not wrinkly from playing with black holes, just bathwater -- I don't have too much time on my hands, It's just an adaptation that gives better grip.
Can't be bothered to read the blog post by the original author? Prefer to read a 3rd layer re-hash?
Sounds like your problem, not GP's...
https://medium.com/something-like-falling/2e7d13e54724
And if you can't tell that it's bullshit from reading the headline, you are an imbecile and can't really be helped.
Fair enough. That does take us away from grammatical errors to other kinds of errors. Of course, there's the common usage argument...
It's a bit off topic anyway. Going back to the original thread parent's statement, it's worth noting that another poster pointed out that what actually started this was a facebook post she made of some firecrackers. That suggests that, if the topic of pressure cooker and backpack searches came up in the police investigation, the investigation started first because of the pictures and they scooped up their search history as part of the investigation. That would seem to make this a less egregious intrusion, except we still have the case of someone being investigated for no good reason.
Too right. You might complain now, but remember that after 9/11 nobody wanted to think, they just wanted something done. The approval ratings at that time were staggering.
Spin it however you want, but it's still democracy working, just not as you want it to. Besides, if people are outraged as you seem to pretend, we'd also see them protesting or actually doing something more, like signing a petition. You got a petition to build a Death Star, so, if people were actually interested they would've done something about it.
Oh get off it, that's what some libertarian claims in every single politics thread. Left and right are the same. R and D are no different.
Libertarians can't see the forest because they're standing in a field of pot plants.
Didn't you get the memo? On Sept 11th 2001 the US stopped being a "free" country and is now a "safe" country.
Oh I got it and I replied all with freedom as an attachment. We just rebuilt the damn building we wouldn't want it to be destroyed again. I mean the 500 dollar lock and door fix on airplanes seems to be a pretty solid solution but what if the pilot has to piss!
In all seriousness, I experienced 911 way too closely. Ever had to think about breathing 1,200+ dead people into your lungs for a few months?
I'm sick of this secretive overreaction and I fully accepted what the future of a digital world and the consequences of it alone would be like 30 years ago! I want my government to stop spending money investigating everyone's perverse curiosities and get back to fixing our country.
I always use https://startpage.com/ for searching.
Here's their pitch: https://startpage.com/eng/privacy-policy.html
Would using this stop this kind of tracking, or am I just naive?
Hahaha. Did anyone else get a targeted ad for backpacks at the top of this page? You can't make this stuff up!
Now I'll be targeted without having even searched for backpacks + pressure cookers! Thanks, /.
-Coward
Is it safe now to google pressure-cookers and backpacks? I'm afraid to try, they can start shooting first "for public safety".
I believe the term that would apply and coined on /. would be fupid ......
tapping the ass -> the ass is getting tapped
From http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/01/employer-tipped-off-police-in-pressure-cookerbackpack-gate-not-google/:
C Northcote Parkinson (of Parkinson's Law fame) suggested that top leaders, like Presidents or Prime Ministers, be attracted by very precise advertising that would ideally attract only one applicant. One of the properties of the advertised office would be that the officeholder would be put to death after his term in office.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Meta: the statement "changing the puppet doesn't change the puppeteer" begs the question,
You: um no. The question begging for an answer
it's not a question did bags. It's the speaker who begs you to ignore his skipping the question.
Oh dear, I'm sure the NSA have never thought of that. I'm more willing to bet they can read even VPN packets than not. I mean when you've got back doors at the OS AND at the hardware level, there's nothing that can get past you. Nothing.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
it was confirmed that it was the Long Island Task Force.
No, some journalists have claimed that it was the LITF. The FBI and the local police have all denied any involvement. Here is a follow up story that seems to indicate that the whole thing was a fabrication. There apparently was no raid, no investigation, nothing ... except a woman that wanted some attention.
No, you probably can't win it, but what's right is right.
Using phrase "begs the question" to mean "raises the question", instead of it's proper meaning of "assumes that which is to be proved" just makes you look like a dolt, or the average rationality-imparied excretion of the US public school system. (Hey, I'm one too, I know: It's taken me decades to overcome my Austin public school education...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I think the fact that people are demonstrably afraid of associating with and supporting tea-party organizations (to a degree that quite possibly changed the outcome of last year's election) pretty much proves the point. After all, who really wants to put themselves directly on the targeted-for-abuse list of the IRS, which will soon wield unaccountable and unappealable powers that the Gestapo would have killed for (literally)?
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Normal Rules of Gramar Do Not Apply to American English FTFY
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
So glad we got Obama at the helm. Next up will be the thought crimes police.
Term limits do not work.. Don't believe me? Look at Mexico, which also shows that more than two parties and a parliament provide no advantage either. The failure lies in majority rule itself. You shouldn't allow 51% of the voters to rule over the other 49%.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The US government has the internet mirrored, they can access what ever they want. Its like a time pool. Mm.
So it looks like this all may be an over-blown non-story.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/government-knocking-doors-because-google-searches/67864/
Supposedly, the cops got a tip from their former employer that they'd found these searches and then went to investigate. If that is the case, well then it is pretty much a non-story. Some employers regularly do look at what is done on their computers because they are paranoid employees are wasting time, stealing, whatever.
All the Google nonsense was pure speculation. It turns out it was here employer who turned her in.
http://feedly.com/k/11xS8Y7
The truth is way more mundane than the initial "the black helicopters are hovering outside" story.
"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."
Sorry to burst everyone's paranoid "USA evil" bubbles.
How else would Hollywood distinguish a storyline in Hitler Germany from one in Obama U.S.A.?
stretching the anus --> the goatse is getting cx'ed.
your mom wants you to move out the basement and make grand kids...
did you read the article, an article, this comment? anything?
"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'." http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-police-terrorism-pressure-cooker it's from his employer...
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.
But then a lot of satires are not really easy to figure out any more when you are living in the U.S.A.
It helps of the bad guys wear Nazi uniforms.
The "visit" was from the Suffolk County Police Department, NOT from the Feds. This is the statement released by that Police Department:
If the police indeed had direct access to the Google searches then it's bad regardless of whether it's a local or Federal LEA. But if what the SCPD is saying is true, then there is really nothing to see here, as all espionage was done by the employer and that is probably even legal.
I don't know if I believe them or not, although the Google snooping does seem a little too sophisticated for a local PD.
I know you are having a moment here, but it turns out that guy was using a work computer and his ex-employer called the cops on him after they noticed a search for “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks.”
Google or govt. snooping was not in play here. That is not to say that that does not happen. However it appears to not have happened here.
The article reads that a recently released employee "googled" pressure cooker bombs on a work computer and this was tipped off to local authority.
Read the article - coome oooon guys...
I read, on another blog, that the people who googled these things were being spied upon by their ex-employers. Those employers are the ones who turned them in, which then got the visit that they received. It wasn't the government spying on these people. I don't doubt that the government spies on us, they just weren't the reason this couple got a visit...
Yup, you can guarantee it that the NSA will (has?) figure out how to hack Google Glass and the like. Then Glassholes will be walking live-feed surveillance systems. Minitrue and the Thought Police can't wait for the masses to get their hands on GG!
RTFA!
"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 employeeâ(TM)s computer searches took place on this employeeâ(TM)s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms âoepressure cooker bombsâ and âoebackpacks.â "
First, Obama is FAR too far to the left for the modern GOP, which has become radical leftists relative to where it was in 1980... so there's no possible WAY Obama could have been like an earlier gen of the GOP. The modern GOP is too far to the left to tolerate what used to pass for a shining example of a left-wing Democrat: JFK (the modern GOP supports higher taxes and bigger government and a smaller military than JFK did, and while JFK NEVER supported gays in the military, gay marriage, publicly-funded abortions, or women in combat, some modern Republicans do.) Modern Democrats have moved so far left that they would DETEST FDR (opposed unionized govt workers), Truman (dropped atom bombs on people), JFK (see preceeding sentences), and LBJ (Vietnam...). I'm sorry if the Democrats have not YET, PUBLICLY, moved far enough left to elect Karl Marx and this makes you unhappy... just wait a few more years and they'll get there; Shortly thereafter, establishment Republicans will move to the left of today's Obama and liberals will again say the GOP (which will still be to their re-positioned right) is "too conservative for Ronald Reagan" .... rinse...repeat...get confused about why the country is further melting-down...
Obama as an economic pragmatist?????? go back to your water pipe dude! Obamanomics are a nightmare. Have you LOOKED at the number of people who are now on foodstamps (highest in US History and nearly double the Bush numbers) the number of people who have given up on work and gone on disability (highest in US History) the massive boost in difference between the incomes of the rich and the middle class (worse than under Bush) and so forth? A pragmatist would do some practical things and NOT the pure left-wing ideological dung Obama had been shoveling (largely through unelected bureaucrats issuing regulations that the leftist press never reports on but businesses get buried under). When Obama took office, Bush had run the national debt to $10Trillion... Obama has taken it to $17Trillion in only 4.5 years! (and the Bush part of the debt includes the Bush debacle of bank and initial car company bailouts... Obama has little excuse) there's nothing "pragmatic" about this no matter WHO does it. There is NOTHING pragmatic about Obama.
Obama's "aggressive user of military force where he perceives an imminent threat to national security"???? You're KIDDING, right? The only things "aggressive" about his military policies are: [a] aggressive cuts to active forces and withdrawl from warzones that lack any realistic plan to prevent collapses of any gains made by shed blood, (while transferring money to "green" activities like $50/gallon biofuels and conversion of military base land into habitats for plants and animals) [b] aggressive attacks on any remnants of traditional culture in the military being replaced by propaganda for perverts (I refuse to be any more politically correct toward lefties about their dysfunctions and proclivities than the left is toward the right when they attack normal heterosexuals as "breeders" and label any religious person on the right as an anti-science moron who thinks the world is 6000 years old and believes Jesus rode on dinosaurs) [c] aggressive use of drones to kill-off anybody Obama personally chooses to kill (this is automated murder, not warfare... he is NOT targeting an enemy force or an enemy machine, but rather a specific named individuals)
Liberals got behind Obama in 08 for the same reason they will push Hillary in 16... because the ends justify the means, and ANY dirtbag that will further the cause of tearing down the greatest nation in history will get the rabid support of the fevered left. The U.S. with its religious not-leftist not-Marxist culture in 1969 put a man on the moon, and has always been visual proof to the argument that free markets and free people trump managed economies, central planning, and national or international socialism every time. When a religious America with a free-market economy leads
Just get a few million people to break the law, and then imply that any politician who legalizes them will get their votes...... and corrupt idiot politicians will announce the need to embrace the law-breaking with no long-term thought for the implications for the rule-of-law. Perhaps if we could get millions (dozens or hundreds cannot do this, of course) of Americans to not pay their taxes...
nah, I suspect that even the most-corrupt politicians would start pontificating on the importance of the rule-of-law if there was an interruption in the flow of tax dollars...
they thought the target might be muslim and did not want to be accused of racism. If they'd known the family was non-muslim the story might have been different
Think of ANYTHING but "pink elephants"... remember: DO NOT THINK ABOUT PINK ELEPHANTS! Never google PINK ELEPHANTS!... etc
With all the talk about pressure cooker bombs and the Boston bombing, I have NO DOUBT that thousands of Americans of all types/ages/sizes/shapes/genders/ideologies/etc googled for this stuff. It would be nearly contrary to basic human nature for many people not to.
We need smarter people in government
You may find this article will aid your social interaction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question
No food, no water.
You will probably need to go to the ICU for kidney failure and shock, but you will be fine if you dont have any pre-existing conditions.
And don't worry. After a thorough investigation, the people responsible will get a raise.
I'm sure it wasn't actually Qradar, but collecting Google searches is a built in function of the QRadar product. Qradar is a SIEM that uses packet sniffing appliances called Qflow to watch corporate network traffic. An out-of-the-box feature is to capture all Google searches. Same functionality as wireshark, but with a much easier interface.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
Everyone should google the same thing. Flood the system with useless data.
What makes you think he isnt a long serving government operative?
If you restrict articles to good journalism, you're going to loose /.'s libertarian base.
But "begging the question X" is not synonymous with "raising the question X". It has a whole separate set of implications. It doesn't just mean "the question X appears". It means "the question X deserves to be asked.
And yes, it's idiomatic, and almost certainly became widespread in its current form because of the older stock phrase, but its current meaning becomes fairly clear if you simply insert the word "for" after the "beg{s|ging}.
And appeals to logic when discussing language is nearly as silly as appeals to logic when discussion people's sexual fetishes. Language comes from people, and people aren't particularly logical.
Prescriptivism is to the science of linguistics as Creationism is to the science of biology.
Note that Michelle Catalano herself did not say this was JTTF or FBI. That was apparently asserted by The Guardian or The Atlantic writing about the incident. Michelle's own writeup simply refers to men with guns and badges, and does not specify who they were with. (BTW, Michelle Catalano is a moderately prominent blogger and writer whose writings certainly remove her from the likely terrorist suspects, if any of these badge-carrying morons had bothered to actually Google anything for themselves before showing up to harass free citizens.)
Here is what Michelle herself had to say about the incident, the most chilling part is at the end:
All of a sudden, Glenn Beck's ranting about the Cloward-Piven-Ayers "collapse the system" strategy doesn't sound so far-fetched. We know now that we have far more to fear from our own government than we do from any terrorist group, even the bloodthirsty suicidal Islamic ones. (FWIW, no Islamic terrorist has ever tried to humiliate me by groping my junk as painfully as possible, but the TSA has. It's time to face the fact that the entire Dept of Homeland Defense was an insanely bad idea and disband it back into its constituent agencies, at pre-9/11 staffing levels. Hell, DHS couldn't even stop the Boston bombing after the Russians *told* us these guys were bombtastic Muslims, so why on earth should we accept any loss of freedom at all to these totalitarian goons?)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
because I wonder where I might relocate for the better with respect to these issues. Recommendations? TIA. (no, I don't mean "Total Information Awareness", Admiral Poindexter...)
ISP
> How'd the government know what they were Googling?
ISP?
Yeah, what a shame that there aren't any operating systems that can be built and audited at the source level.
Interesting
The FBI would be very busy.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Welcome to the Peoples Democratic Republic of AmeriKa...
The whole point of the Senate was to have the landed gentry elect elite Senators who were not beholden to the populous. That's what this republic was founded on.
Learn to love Alaska
I thought it was based on "you are a slave of the country you are born in, with no rights they don't bestow upon you, unless you move elsewhere." That seems to be the practical application of the "social contract" these days. I don't consent to the US operations. I moved. I recommend everyone else with means does so before the fall (and no, not autumn).
Learn to love Alaska
I mean, NSA is getting the private keys for the vendors and the authenticators so HTTPS is a screen door now right?
About 2 years ago my pressure cooker overheated and the safety plug melted. I order a new plug on-line, but when I attempted to install it, it was apparently incorrectly threaded and destroyed the threads on the pressure cooker lid. I hold a requiem for my old 6-quart pressure cooker of 20 years (which was too bulky anyway) and determine to buy a new one once I got the chance. Time passes....
And the Boston Bombings (BBs) occur. Which reminds me that I need a new pressure cooker. But other things come up so it waits a few weeks. Time passes...
I make a "to do" list including the pressure cooker. Armed with my new list I visit local shops and, to my surprise, can find no pressure cookers whatsoever - zip, nada, zilch, zero. Strange, perhaps the Boston Bombings reminded everyone to rush out and buy one before I did?!?. So I Google News to find that certain stores yanked all pressure cookers after the BB occurred! But they mention only one store chain on the East coast and I'm in big-city Texas with nary a goddam pressure cooker in sight. I visit the local Indian and Chinese markets to find again, no pressure cookers available. I become convinced that there is an NSA conspiracy to yank all pressure cookers from store shelves in the USA. My brother-in-law warns my wife how dangerous pressure cookers are ("they'll blow up the kitchen", etc.). I calm her down: the worst I've seen was a soybean volcano (never, ever, ever under any circumstances attempt to cook dried soybeans in a pressure cooker!)
In the end I gave up on the local stores and ordered a nice Presto 4-qt pressure cooker from Amazon. It was NOT delivered by the NSA, nor did the FBI make inquiries. My wife is pleased to see how quickly and efficiently it cooks even very tough meats in 15 minutes (and best of all that it didn't blow up the kitchen). It should last another 25 years. But it was a PITA finding it. I haven't checked again, but I'll bet you'd still have difficulty finding a pressure cooker at the local markets.
But if there are no other jobs in sight, they will do what they have to do to put food on the table for their kids.
Sure, but that's not what I was discussing, which was just that figures of speech are generally not required to follow standard rules of grammar. Whether that figure of speech itself was used properly is a different question.
Should be the other way round, first serve in prison, if you survive, you get to be president. I still like David Eddings idea, the people who want to serve as president are automatically disqualified. Then you put everyone else's name in a hat and draw randomly. That person's assets are then seized and sold off, the money going into the countries coffers. At the end of the term if the country did well and his money is still in the coffers he gets it back, if it didn't do so well then he doesn't get it back. Seems better than listening to baby kissing liars, promising the world with one hand while holding the dildo behind his back with the other.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Didn't you get the memo? On Sept 11th 2001 the US stopped being a "free" country and is now a "safe" country. So shut up about your worthless "freedom" and "constitution" and "rights" you terrorist defending traitor!
No,no. "Freedom" is fine, "Liberty" is a banned word.
Dunno why. But it must be part of new-speak. Freedom, Unity, Standing together, Defending our Freedom - all fine.
Liberty, Personal liberty, Dissent, Protest - baaad.
don't blow your lid
We are just a bunch of people with special interests and sometimes even careers and research areas, all in the same forum.
The word "republic" has nothing to do with how people vote or what they vote for. It simply means a country which does not have a hereditary head of state. The term you are looking for is "representative democracy". There are representative democracies which are not republics (the UK, for example). Heck - any country without a monarch which has no voting at all is a republic too. I have no idea where you got that bizarre idea of what "republic" means.
Do you actually know what slavery means? Because being able to simply walk away whenever you want is pretty much the antithesis of slavery.
But yes, that pretty much is what the social contract is: others agree to behave towards you as if you had certain rights - not bestow them, but simply modify their own behaviour - in exchange of you modifying yours. Do you have better ideas about how to go about it?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
And how did you obtain the encryption keys? Online transfer?
Think about this - if you're using end-to-end encryption, VPN, etc - then this will be seen within the traffic they are monitoring and throw up a flag.
If you're going via a foreign VPN then that puts you outside domestic monitoring and so open to foreign powers aswell as your own governments enhanced snooping.
You haven't been reading what Snowden has been releasing, have you?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I like a hate-on against the budding police state as much as the next Slashdotter, and for all I know, they could very well be monitoring your Google searches, but that doesn't appear to be the case here.
According to Wired, it was actually a former employer that reported the searches to the police after finding them on the man's computer. It's not at all surprising to find that private employer is looking through and monitoring their *own* systems.
Too bad this comment will probably go unread and unmodded amongst the 600+ or so at the time of this posting.
While I **DO** tend small-L libertarian, the bottom line is, that elected officials serving for long periods of time tend to get captured by the system. To the point that their EFFECTIVE constituency is not the people that elected them, but the Government. The United States Senate is the most obvious example: for the most part, Senators are only replaced when dead or dying. . .
They didn't.
I'm sorry, but your facts are wrong... this is the quote from Michele herself: "It was a confluence of magnificent proportions that led six agents from the joint terrorism task force to knock on my door Wednesday morning." (my emphasis). So yes, she mentioned the JTTF first, not the guardian.
We also now know that Michele was never the target, so knowing anything about her would not have helped the police remove her from suspicion; she was never suspected! It was her husband who was accused by a private company due to activity on the computer he used for work (no feds looking through their personal computer), who was for reasons unknown recently no longer employed by that company.
I'm amazed how much misinformation there is about this situation. I think we need to have sane limits in place and sane conversations about these issues... basing any conversations on incorrect facts does not help anyone.
Why indeed the law enforcement would have seen the need to react if the couple wouldn't have been in a list of suspicious persons. How many millions of people are on those lists would be the next question. Then comes the question of whether the relative amount of Americans in the American lists is bigger than the relative amount of East Germans in the Stasi's corresponding list.
The update to this story is worth considering. What they';re saying now is it wasn't the guy's home ISP, it was the fact that he was using a company computer. But the guy was a former employee of that company. So he still had their computer- I am guessing a laptop. So I can guess he very very recently left that company. This is where it gets interesting.
Did he leave or was he fired? Because if he left, then why would the company who owns the laptop *even consider* that his Googling a recently-in-the-news story amounted to terrorism and call the cops?
If he was *fired* however, then it starts to make sense (presuming we are being told the truth and have the facts).
That implies that the firing was not pretty. Anyone who works for a living knows managers who don't ike you for any personal or frivolous reason have the ability through HR departments to trump up charges against you. "Performance Improvement Programs" and other such names are HR speak for "get the fuck out we don't like you". . Probably the vast majority of firings are of this type- no real cause except someone doesn't like you.
People get very angry when this kind of slander-without-consequence is directed at them; especially when it results in denying them the ability to pay their bills and they've done nothing wrong.
HR departments know very well that people get angry when they lie about them then fire them. They have all kinds of precautions they take when they're firing someone. They also worry about the person coming back and going postal.
This is what happened then, right? They abused this guy, then got paranoid that the guy was going to get even. Or there is real animosity from the company and they were watching his searches hoping to find anything they could use as an excuse to call the Feds .
Thinking about it some more, I would not be surprised to find out that the Feds know (now) that this is what the company was doing,. That companies do this as a kind "kiss off" gesture to employees they really hate. They said they get 100 of these calls a week. A week? Really? Really? What county reasonably suspects it has 100*52 = 5200 suspected terrorists in it? It's not about terrorism. It's about disgruntled employees and companies that have learned how to trigger the Homeland Security response on people they have fucked over.
I wonder what the Feds or locals actually think of this use of their resources. I wonder if they don't see it as a problem they can't do anything about, lest one real one slip by. It's like all the false home security alarms that were going off. Finally they said if it goes off and it's nothing, homeowner /company pays costs of response. That solved that problem.
Wonder how long it will be until they say the same thing to these abusive companies. Hard not to see this as a cynical abuse of the system. Cops have to respond. Companies know this. OPh look, backpacks and pressure cookers- BINGO! Lets turn 'em in.... HAW HAW HAW HAW..
Lesson here? Don't use your company's computers, cellphone or network at home.
LOL. It happens that I was just checking out both things: I want to buy a pressure cooker for my B-day and also a nice military backpack. XD Maybe they take it aw an excuse to visit our local coffee-shops (they don't sell coffee in them)
-- 29A the number of the Beast
You really need to ask this question? Or you just playing stewpit?
The article has an update posted now a day later:
It says out the guy had been fired/laidoff ("released") from his job. His WORK was spying on his searches AT WORK from his WORK computer.
They reviewed his searches and freaked out and reported him to the county cops to investigate.
I'm not saying it wasn't unfortunate for the guy, but let's be clear that for THIS issue this was NOT it turns out a "the feds spy on me" story.
This is a "your EMPLOYER spies on you" story.
From what I understand, it was pressure cookers, backpacks, and the Boston incident on a company computer, ans the company alerted Police. The PD in due diligenc, followed up. Good for them!
He's been waiting with bated breath to get that next terrorist action stopped.
It's important that the rest of us understand what we're getting for our $10 billion per year.
All you liberal bleeding heart types can now sleep solidly in bed.
"The truth? You can’t handle the truth!”
Jack Nicholson (as Col. Nathan R. Jessep)
Except that it's the misused version of 'begets', and not the actual concept of 'begs'. It's about as correct as 'wratched' being used currently in place of 'wretched', but it's never been about 'begging'.
I'm really surprised at the Atlantic using a photo from the Boston bombing investigation and trying to pass it off as a photo of the incident in question. I'm also pretty skeptical of the fact that the alleged victim is a writer. You can't buy publicity like this.
Seems to me that if someone wants to test their VPN or Tor it's a good way to see if the eN eS Ay has the ability to see what they're up to.
A reading of the complete article(s) shows that it was the husband's laptop that was turned in for servicing to his company IT department. Some snitch in the IT department searched his Google log and called the cops.
Begs these questions: 1- Was the wife and kid using his work laptop for personal use? 2-Does the company IT department track that? 3-Did that use violate company policy?
Apparently this was all done over his person's work computer and it was the company that reported it to local authorities. So I gather.
I for one hate Emmanuel Goldstein.
Damn, doesn't pay to take the family camping....
Do you actually know what slavery means? Because being able to simply walk away whenever you want is pretty much the antithesis of slavery.
Any slave was "free" to walk away. Only very very rarely was any slave forced to work in chains (that was generally reserved for prisoners). In the USA, you are free to walk away, so long as you pay taxes for the rest of your life, though you are allowed to renounce your citizenship, but that is not necessarily recognized by the government (so you can walk away, but are legally property until they agree to let you go), as the US can declare you a criminal (tax evasion) and extradite you back, even if they supposedly accepted your renouncement.
Many get out, like me, because we were middle class slaves. When you own 300,000,000 slaves, who notices if a few unremarkable ones escape? They don't let the exceptional ones go (measured by wealth).
But yes, that pretty much is what the social contract is: others agree to behave towards you as if you had certain rights - not bestow them, but simply modify their own behaviour - in exchange of you modifying yours. Do you have better ideas about how to go about it?
Yes, explicit agreement to the social contract at ages 8, 12,18, and 21, and denial at 18 or 21 results in deportation to Antarctica (or buy an area in Africa or Siberia of sufficient size), though it'd require Constitutional and treaty changes to make it legal, why make the contract implicit, when it's within our power to make it explicit?
Learn to love Alaska
The OP makes out that they were casually searching 'Pressure Cookers' and 'Backpacks' in the comfort of their own homes, and Google gave them up. This is not the case...
They were searching "PRESSURE COOKER BOMBS", and they did it on a work computer, which the administrator then noticed and REPORTED.
Nope. Do some research. They were at work, and the admin noticed a search for 'Pressure Cooker Bombs'.....
"stewpot", "steamed" - i see what you did there. careful you don't get fricasseed.
You're right...the USA is no longer a free country. As far as safe, I seriously doubt it. In fact, I think we are less "safe" than ever before in our history!! Worthless "freedom and constitution and rights"?? You, l0ungeb0y, are the traitor!!
cf. "Hobson's Choice."
I hate to be a karma whore, but your employer was the one monitoring, and raising red flags.
Sucks to be all you knee-jerk reactionaries who don't bother to read, or follow up on news.
I lied. I enjoy karma whoring when my cautionary nature is right.