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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?"
You really need to ask this question? Or you just playing stewpit?
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
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!
We should all Google 'pressure cooker' and 'backpacks'. Let's send them for a spin.
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.
Changing the puppet doesn't not necessarily change the puppeteer.
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.
Except that google.com defaults to https. So whoever was wiresharking had Google's SSL key or some other kind of inside access.
Oh well just the local police, that's fine then.
[/sarcasm]
Google does not default to https. It only does that if you are signed in with an account. If these people weren't, then anybody could have seen their searches with relative ease.
Uhhh...I thought it was common knowledge that the search engines and the feds are all buddy buddy? Not that it would have really mattered since we now know about the wiretap they have on the AT&T trunks which everything goes through at one time or another.
What I find ironic about all this is if they EVER catch a single terrorist thanks to all this big brother crap? It'll be the kind too fucking dumb to have been any good at being a terrorist, your Richard Reid "useful idiot" kind of Muslim extremist. Any terrorist that could actually do any damage, your Abu Nidal mean motorscooter types aren't gonna be so damned retarded as to Google for instructions with zero obfuscation, not when you have multiple free anonymizing services and search engines that don't log like DuckDuckGo and Scroogle.
So once again we have the government wasting huge piles of money and infringing the rights and privacy of everyone for a program that won't work...must be Thursday.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
They can't get all of us at the same time. Making a long list of people to get, whenever they please, is just providing them job security.
When will Americans get their heads out of their ass and accept that this is not about any single president? This is bigger than the President. It's bigger than either party. And it's not good for Americans regardless of their party, their gender, their age, their color...
When we use childish reasoning it allows the abuse to continue.
$i = 0
while $i = 0
wget ”http://www.google.com/search?q=Pressure+Cooker"
wget ”http://www.google.com/search?q=backpack"
'Nuff Said
When I see an angry dog, I like to poke at it with a stick, too. Rational things happen every time!
Have you guys not been following US news for the last two months?
Shame on her husband for allowing jack booted thugs into their home. Never consent to a search, and never speak to the police, except to assert your right to remain silent and request a lawyer. Every citizen who consents to these searches encourages them to do more.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Which begs the questions: Who is the puppeteer? Why don't Americans do something about it?
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.
United Stasi of America. It's here. X-Keyscore proves it can't be avoided almost in any way.
Full take of all of the data is constantly analyzed. By now the responsibility must have been given to a faceless algorithm, so there is no one to sue, no one to accuse. People around the machine are just supporting staff, like those working at the concentration camps - who just followed their orders given by the machine.
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. . . "
Actually, the statement "changing the puppet doesn't change the puppeteer" begs the question, "is the president a puppet under control of a puppeteer?" The statement begs that unanswered question by assuming the answer to be yes.
If the answer to that question is "yes," then we would raise the question, "who is the puppeteer?"
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Yes. With ease. I'm assuming that their local ISP will gladly hand over information. We have seen in the past how willing ISPs are to work with the RIAA/MPAA, so why wouldn't they work with law enforcement or the FBI?
You do realize that people can criticize Obama without having wanted to vote for Romney, right? People can actually have views beyond that false dilemma.
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
That was just luck. Look at the examples where the swat team goes to the wrong address and the family does end up dead. Free country indeed!
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Except they said they do this "100 times a week". The implications of that are staggering. 100 times a week? That is 5200 raids a year.... if they are not putting terrorists away by the truckload then they have some serious explaining to do.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
But in this case, they couldn't get a (regular) warrant. There is no probable cause. The only power they have is the threat of a warrant. Unless secret warrants are easier to get.
So once again we have the government wasting huge piles of money and infringing the rights and privacy of everyone for a program that won't work...
The problem here is your definition of "working", in this context. You appear to believe them when they say the system is meant to catch terrorists, rather than monitor & control the general population, including congressmen and other politicians, judges, etc.
It's working just fine.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
It might be a false dichotomy, but it's not a false dilemma. All your choices are bad. Voting for someone who has no chance of getting enough votes to get into office might be more respectable, but it's still a bad choice too. That is, unless you're going by the original Greek roots and that saying dilemma means there are only two choices. That's not really the current meaning in English, though.
The founding fathers never foresaw global megacorporations with concentrations of wealth and power that exceeds that of some actual countries.
You've obviously never heard of The British East India Company.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
The Boston bombers had nothing to do with either Korea nor China.
So you're saying that they should only pay attention to potential bombers who are identical in EVERY aspect, even though islamic terrorism is not tied to any one country?
"Oh sorry sir, I didn't see you lacked curly hair. By all means continue wiring up that dynamite and timer, I'll be on my way".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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
What exactly does it mean to have a right if the government can punish you for exercising it?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Right. They record your phone call, make a text transcription and then discard the recording (unless you're on a special watchlist or trip any red flags). The text is just the metadata!
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
...FOILED by PRISM. Nice work boys.
If you folks on the right had asked one of us *liberals* back in '08, we'd have told you Obama wasn't one of us. He's essentially what would have been a centrist Republican thirty years ago. These were people, like Bob Dole, that we liberals didn't agree with, but could respect and work with. In fact, "Obamacare" pretty much follows the private sector oriented reform plans of Bob Dole. If Obama were a liberal he'd have gone with single payer, and negotiated tough price concessions with pharmaceutical manufacturers (which is the source of America's runaway heath care spending). You'd have seen banks regulated or broken apart, and criminal investigations in response to the financial crisis of '08, not an attempt to put the system back together again the way it was before the crash.
In fact Obama is very much the kind of president Dole would have been: an economic pragmatist, a diplomatic multilateralist, and an aggressive user of military force where he perceives an imminent threat to national security.
If you want to stop state intrusion into private affairs, you've got to stop being afraid, and convince others around you to stop being afraid. The more fear there is in the political climate, the more impunity the government has in its actions.
Liberals got behind Obama in '08 for the same reason we got behind Obamacare: we backed the best alternative achievable in a climate of fear -- a climate, by the way, that makes the state internal security apparatus feel empowered to do anything it wants in the search for terrorists.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"Google does not default to https"
It does when you've got HTTPS Everywhere (EFF plugin) installed on every PC you use :)
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!
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 means you have a tyrannical government acting above outside of or against their mandate.