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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?"
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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?
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