Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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]
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.
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?
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.
You people really have too much time on your hands.
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.
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.
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
A) (The number of pressure cooker bombs made) / (the number of pressure cookers sold) is virtually 0.
B) (The number of backpacks used to bomb something) / (the number of backpacks sold) is virtually 0.
Even taking A and B together, (the number of pressure cooker bombs transported in backpacks) / (the number of people who own both pressure cookers and backpacks) is virtually 0.
A and B are meaningless. Worse than meaningless, they waste resources that could be put toward investigating real threats.
C) With all the news about pressure cooker bombs, there are lots of people, in the 10s of millions, who have searched for what a pressure cooker bomb is, myself included.
D) Lots of people travel. Neither China nor S. Korea are hotbeds of terrorist activity. N. Korea is all but impossible to enter from either of those countries.
And for gods sake, most importantly, absolutely none of this should have been known by any law enforcement agency because they had no probable cause to start an investigation in the first place. There is a serious problem when everyone American citizen's internet activity and travel history are being constantly monitored.
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!
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.
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!