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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?"
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?
Yes - and skipping all the intelligence they have legally.
Besides, if you're into camping and canning foods you're obviously an insurgent, right?
funnily enough two of the task force should have raided themselves. I think the problem is that you have such a task force ready to go with nothing to do all fucking year long, so they claim to do 100 raids a WEEK and that once a week(1%) they caught something. why is none of those ever reported?
warrant isn't mentioned in the article either, not for getting the data and not for performing the raid(which they i think claim was "consentual", but what the fuck do you expect people to do if you come up geared for a war and want in..)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
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?
Those people will turn out to be <adjective>-wing domestic terrorists, who were also <group which is politically acceptible to revile>. When the police arrived for a routine investigation the terrorists shot their own dogs and then comitted suicide by shooting themselves in the back on their heads. Twice.
At least, that's what will happen as far as you'll be told.
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!
I think we already know the answer to that question.
they have a hard time showing actual harm.
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? Oh, who am I kidding? The answer is obvious...
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
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.
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?
1. The check is in the mail.
2. Trust me, I'm a Lawyer.
3. You won't get pregnant, really.
4. The NSA is not blanket monitoring everyone.
These 4 statements have something in common. We leave determining what that is, as an exercise for the alert mind. . .
There's another possibility......their son just got served with a warrant for drugs/vandalism/whatever, and they don't want the neighbors to know. At this point all we have really are rumors.
Don't jump to conclusions, remember, that's how innocent people started getting harassed when Reddit 'found' the marathon bomber.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The good news is, they only inspect the contents if they think you're a terrorist. The bad news, they think about 300 million of us are terrorists!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
The remarkable thing is that they've never come knocking on my door, given how many times (as part of research for my novels) I've searched for all manner of bomb-making chemistry, information about types of firearms, information about poisons, etc. I guess when they saw me use a planetary orbit calculator to compute precise positions of planets several hundred years in the future, they concluded that I wasn't dangerous, just seriously OCD. :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
See Lawrence Lessig's TED Talk about Lesterland.
The reason American's don't do something about it is because the Lesters (aka, the puppeteer) only offer puppets in the general election that the Lesters have pre-approved. A candidate not meeting with the Lesters' approval never makes it to the ballot of a general election. Thus making the farce of a general election seem meaningful when in fact it is not.
As long as the population can be approximately 50/50 split over two parties (that both are attached to the puppeteer's strings) and political party fighting and mudslinging can be kept to a maximum over issues the Lesters don't care about, the populace will contentedly remain asleep and feel that they still have some actual power through the ballot box.
The founding fathers never foresaw global megacorporations with concentrations of wealth and power that exceeds that of some actual countries.
I hope that answers your question. Sorry for not linking the Lesterland TED Talk video, but I'm sure you can google it.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
No, what you are doing is coercing the government into investing in AI, in an incremental sort of way. AI as an "evolutionary arms race".
(Actually, they've probably aleady passed the point where your approach would work. But they'll still need to look at it carefully so that the counter-AI doesn't slip messages into something they've decided is irrelevant.)
FWIW, I'm rather certain that this particular arms race is already well advanced. Unfortunately. I'm much rather that a working AI evolved out of a hospital management system, but the progress along that front is looking much slower.
It's important to realize that nobody understands the large computer systems that run things. Different people understand different parts of them, but the interactions between the parts are frequently surprising. Usually these interactions are bugs...but that's the nature of evolution. (Note that evolution is an abstract process, and DNA is only one concrete instantiation of the abstract class.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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?
Partly because we like to avoid the shear quantity of unknown components that go into most industrial goods. Soaps and lotions, for example, often have chemicals like parabens in them which can mimic estrogens. The jury's still out on whether exposure to these leads to higher incidences of cancers, etc., but we don't really care to be part of this over-sized experiment to which industry has managed to subject us all. We don't go all organic and avoid all industrial products--indeed we're unable to do so as we don't have the capital to do so. But we do what we can, where we can.
Partly because we have an interest in old traditions and dying arts. My wife is a weaver and a spinner by trade and I often at least try the older methods when I do something (thus e.g. making my own bows for archery, mixing egg tempura for when I paint, or learning to build fire with flint and steel). Even if one decides that modern methods are more convenient, doing things the older way can give a better since of quality in goods and what goes into them than one would otherwise have. At one point, my wife decided to give soap-making a try and it just stuck. It was easy enough and gave her enough control over the product (using different fats, applying different scents from the garden and elsewhere) that she found she preferred this over buying soap. I might also add that it's cheaper.
Above all because we don't want to be like Arthur Dent who, during his sojourn on Lamuella, assumed that as a modern man he would be able to introduce to the primitive natives a great many modern conveniences. Then he realized that he actually didn't know how to do or make much of anything. Fortunately for him, he still fared well as the sandwich maker.
"The founding fathers never foresaw global megacorporations with concentrations of wealth and power that exceeds that of some actual countries."
The problem is not "both parties are the same team", nor "puppeteers giving false choices". Those are distractions.
The problem is that the U.S. system failed to account for parties. The fact that half of Congress is on a "team", in support or opposed to the President, causes them to vote pro-team instead of for the country or their constituents, which short-circuits the checks and balances that the division of government was meant to establish. This is compounded by first-past-the-post voting which by Duverger's Law guarantees a two-party system. Then voting game theory all but assures that those two parties will converge on certain key topics (like law enforcement and war, i.e., the important stuff).
Did the founding fathers foresee this problem? Definitely yes -- it's the whole point of Washington's Farewell Address, and it's eerily prescient. Countries with constitutions that admit to, and take into account, the presence of parties in politics don't have quite the same level of dysfunction that the U.S. does.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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.
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...
What you have to be asking, is how do these spy agencies get a guy like Obama, who painted himself as the grand reformer, the president for the people, to jump in bed with them and defend them to the hilt?
Did they tell him: "We know what you did in Russia, Barry!"? Or did the intelligence community as a whole run this guy for president (twice) and make sure he won? How many ballot boxes did they stuff? How many electronic voting machines did they compromise?
And in light of their capabilities, how can we ever contemplate electronic voting in this country?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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?
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?
John Adam's wrote about the role of government being to protect the property of the ownership class (paraphrasing).
That's all they've ever done, then gone and lied about it to the people. The Civil War was about economics, not slavery. Slavery was involved as an economic issue, not a human rights one, and the slaves were freed as a wartime tactic to cause problems within the South (and help get the generally pacifistic abolitionists in the North on board with the war). But, once we won the war for the rich white northerners, it became a war of liberation of the slaves.
A standing military benefits only the rich. If Mexico invaded tomorrow and took over the US, how do you think the lives of the homeless in San Francisco would change? Not a bit. How do you think the life of Bill Gates would change when Mexico nationalizes Microsoft and seizes his holdings? Yes, the middle class may see an effect, but not nearly as much as the elite asserts. The rich are the only ones benefiting from a standing military, and spend billions planting the idea that the poor should pay for it.
Learn to love Alaska
The founding fathers never foresaw global megacorporations with concentrations of wealth and power that exceeds that of some actual countries.
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BMO