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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
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
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.
Wonder if they would have got picked up so fast if they used anon search engines like startpage.com or duckduckgo.com?
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
Except that google.com defaults to https. So whoever was wiresharking had Google's SSL key or some other kind of inside access.
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.
Oh well just the local police, that's fine then.
[/sarcasm]
$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
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.
you must be new here
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
What will happen is that the feds will watch obsessively for people doing this (pressure cookers and backpacks) until someone figures another way to hurt others, then the will switch to that.
That's why we still take off our shoes (shoe bomber) and then sniff our undies (underwear bomber).
I usually eat lots of aromatics before a flight to make sure the undies have a very nice bouquet for TSA should they insist on the Full Monty
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Have you guys not been following US news for the last two months?
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.
You say that as if Romney was any better in that regard. We all know that every president is going to support the military police state. But at least Obama isn't trying to destroy America with tax cuts so that a few billionaires can masturbate over an even larger pile of cash.
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.
it's because the title of the article has changed during the day, it used to the be "the feds", look at the footnote in the article
.I thought it was common knowledge that the search engines and the feds are all buddy buddy?
But, but...the NSA head and several Congressmen have assured us that they aren't blanket monitoring everyone. And surely they wouldn't lie!
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
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.
Theoretically, it is supposed to be impossible to get a judge to sign a warrant without probable cause. You know, that Fourth Amendment thing. Seems to me that searching for backpack and pressure cooker hardly qualifies as probable cause. Then again, at least the polizei did not just storm in with a knockless search warrant or shoot their dog for barking.
Isn't it past time to restore a little sanity in our fear-mongering quest for zero-risk from terrorists?
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....
With ease?
Are u sure u know how all this works?
There's nothing simple about intercepting client server anonymous traffic on the net. Much less the scope of the data that google processes. Also ssl doesn't matter if google is forking over the data internally.
And always wear clean underwear.
Have gnu, will travel.
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?
TFA says they only Googled backpacks and pressure cookers, nary a purchase was made; They only searched for information on it.
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.
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. . .
TFA didn't say they *bought* anything.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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
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..)
Imagine: "Sir, do you consent to a search where we poke and prod around your house and not damage anything, or will you force us to get a warrant and we can completely destroy your house during the 'search'?"
Hint: Courts have ruled that damage done under a search warrant is generally not compensated.
There have been cases where officers "looking for drugs" will damage homes to the point where they are uninhabitable, but the courts rule the individual must pay for the damage. Police performing a "search" can destroy just about any property they want. Smashing vases and poking holes in drywall as part of the "search" are generally considered legal. The police can even burn down your house an not pay you for it (see Patel v US and many other cases).
It has gotten to the point that "inverse condemnation" via police action is now a thing. Police and other government agents so greatly damage the property that it is the equivalent of condemnation.
No, you really don't want them force to get a warrant if they already don't like you.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Or if you use the proper extension.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
but... they stopped 58 terrorist plots according to the NSA. They just missed Boston because the bombers only had "ties" to terrorists, they weren't terrorists themselves... oh wait, what's a terrorist again?
They also missed the fort shooting, the school shootings, the theater, embassy bombings, trail derailing (can we blame the terrorists for these yet?), and random factory explosions. But 58... that's a big real number.
Feel free to chime in with anything else they've missed like common sense.
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.
Forget WireShark.
Even if you are signed in with an account, no need to trust SSL.
The NSA could be getting unencrypted traffic from within Google/Microsoft/AmericanCompanies, with their cooperation, whether willingly or unwillingly.
The NSA could also be getting duplicate copies of customer certs issued by CAs in order to play MITM. Or the NSA might get their own signing cert from the CA. Remember when Mozilla revoked a CA for giving a signing cert to a company that made border firewalls to play MITM?
The NSA can also get their own piece of equipment located within an ISP with a secret warrant that the ISP cannot talk about. That equipment might do more than is represented by the warrant shown to the ISP. The first step would be for such devices to manipulate network switches and their management.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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.
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.
This. Mod parent up.
I find it personally amusing when before congress the NSA says that it stopped over 30+ terrorist attacks due to their snooping efforts. Then it was reclarified to "about a dozen." How many attacks prevented (or so they say) is worth using the 4th amendment as toilet paper and violating the rights of millions? I would say "zero".
"Those who wish to give up liberty for security deserve neither, and will lose both."
They were visited by local police, not the feds. Bit of a difference.
This is tangental to the issue though... where did the /local police/ get the information from? If any county or sheriff's office can get their hands on this information, the same guys who fund themselves via speed traps etc., then the situation is even worse. The alternative is that they were tipped off by either Google or the FBI. Both of these are almost as worrying.
The only real upside to this is that it appears the various levels of policing are now actually communicating, which I believe is a plus, even if their information gathering techniques are suspect.
You say that as if Romney was any better in that regard. We all know that every president is going to support the military police state. But at least Obama isn't trying to destroy America with tax cuts so that a few billionaires can masturbate into an even larger pile of cash.
FTFY
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.
The test I just tried says otherwise: navigating to www.google.com redirected to https://www.google.com/ even though I was not logged into any Google services.
That being said, perhaps they used the search bar on IE or Firefox (or whatever) and it used vanilla non-secure www.google.com to conduct the search.
Two things...
1. It's MITM attacks that intercept traffic, wireshark would be a tool used to log it, not intercept it.
2. MITM on this scale is unfeasible, they have a backdoor to google.
Tapping an IX... maybe, but more likely the backdoor.
Also my money's on they're going to say the brits tipped them off with their "known" wiretapping program preying on the public's ignorance of BGP routing.
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.
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?
Have gnu, will travel.
The Guardian article about NSA's XKeyscore shows that they sweep up referrer information from general internet traffic, which includes the Google search terms. So they don't need to see your actual Google activity when they can see where you go from there.
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!
The tax cuts are peanuts compared to what they get from government contracts.
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
I'm thinking the feds offload the search task to the "local" level to remove themselves from the lense of scrutiny.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
"There are exactly 57 card-carrying members of the Communist Party in the Department of Defense at this time!" - Sen. John Yerkes Iselin
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
Their ISP, RIAA/MPAA, law enforcement and the FBI do not constitute "anybody". Anybody encompasses some guy sitting in a basement on the other side of the planet. I don't believe you could create a compelling argument that it would be "easy" for him to see their search data.
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.
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"
I'd like to have more tax cuts so I can masturbate over a small stack of dollar bills. Either way, more money for me, less for the NSA.
Hey now, Obama did promise to bring more transparency to government.
And he did just that!
New definition of transparency in government: when the government is doing something right in your field of view, but you cannot see it because it is not opaque.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
How ironic it is to see the first post under "You may like to read:" be DuckDuckGo: Illusion of Privacy...
Remember:
Knowledge is power, but he who controls the information reigns supreme. --Hackers Creed
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
They should sue the government in civil court for emotional distress.
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).
I think he was being sarcastic. I doubt the NSA filters all traffic from them internet tubes though an XP install running Wireshark.
DuckDuckGo is mostly an front-end to Bing, providing shallow anonymization. It would be a lot of work to figure out what https query to some DDG server matched what bing query. Yes, you could probably get the answer by capturing all metadata for the internet, and putting the pieces together, but even with the data it's non-trivial. I'd say DDG gives pretty good privacy.
I assume the case in TFA was just the feds telling Google long ago: "send us the IP address of anyone who makes any of the following queries" and more recently adding "pressure cookers and backpacks" to that list.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Presumably you mean certificates using NSA-generated key pairs, but that are otherwise identical to the "customer certs".
But, but...the NSA head and several Congressmen have assured us that they aren't blanket monitoring everyone. And surely they wouldn't lie!
You're right of course, not everybody. Just everybody outside of the government and all the related agencies are not being monitored.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
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?
Aw crap! Get rid of the 'not' in there.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
The NSA issued a demand for corporations to hand over their private keys - or something to that effect. I know that in the UK it's illegal not to comply.
And by nailing this family they're up to 59! Well, maybe not this one (today at least) as they seem to have gotten to the newspaper faster than they could run them through a secret court. But I'm sure there are other serious googling terrorist plotters when the stats need padding and the budget needs justification.
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!
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.
Ah, but I am browsing (and do all my searching) in "Incognito Mode"... so I'm safe, right? Riiight?
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
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?
what makes you actually think you wouldn't be found through duckduckgo?
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.
No. Less taxes does not mean less money for the NSA. it means the same NSA money, and more deficit spending, leading to America's total economic collapse, leaving China as the only remaining superpower.
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.
Their ISP, RIAA/MPAA, law enforcement and the FBI do not constitute "anybody". Anybody encompasses some guy sitting in a basement on the other side of the planet. I don't believe you could create a compelling argument that it would be "easy" for him to see their search data.
If they were using WiFi, or somebody taps into their outgoing internet line (Cable/DSL/What have you), then it is possible to snoop on non-https traffic. Though I would only consider it to be "with ease" if it was unencrypted WiFi. Not that I believe that's what took place, as that would mean that the couple in question were under suspicion and investigation prior to those searches.
Go to https://encrypted.google.com/ and it should stay SSL, even when not logged in.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
You're supposed to go to https://encrypted.google.com/ - you're using the wrong subdomain.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Also ssl doesn't matter if google is forking over the data internally.
SSL doesn't matter if the CAs are compromised by the feds too. Both of these are probably the case.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That's largely useless advice. After they shoot you in the head, it's almost certain you're going to shit yourself.
...please buy your stuff online or we're doomed. The NSA just leaves the office if the system flags you.
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.
Actually, Law enforcement and the FBI are groups within the population of the world as a whole. Anybody could literally be anyone on the planet with a chance that somebody at random is a member of law enforcement or FBI. So while 'Anybody does indeed encompass some guy sitting in a basement... it just as easily encompasses someone in law enforcement or the FBI.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
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 assume the case in TFA was just the feds telling Google long ago: "send us the IP address of anyone who makes any of the following queries" and more recently adding "pressure cookers and backpacks" to that list.
The answer to this behavior is for lots and lots of people to Google pressure cookers and backpacks.
Something like a browser plugin that, rather than Googling for random stuff "Scroogle"-style, randomly Googles keywords like pressure-cooker, etc.
Poison the well. Make their systems useless.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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
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
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.
The only reasonable assumption today is that the NSA captures all traffic on the internet at the ISP-customer borders,
That would be a rather dumb place to capture the data. Much simpler to capture it at the ISP-Backbone border. Or, better yet, at the interlinks between tier-1 backbone providers.
Blue House.
When did Smurfs become a terrorist threat...?
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
As if. I assure you, they are all monitoring the ever loving crap out of each other for dirty laundry also. That's been going on even longer than they've been spying on all of us (though they certainly have always WANTED to spy on all of us).
Just another ignorant American.
The article doesn't even say that... it quotes the FBI as saying it was the Nassau and Suffolk County Police, but according to this article at the gothamist, Nassau Police aren't aware of it.
Besides that, it was only speculation on the woman's part that her search results were related, due to the crock pot comment. I'm open to all the government criticism and even the rare conspiracy theory, but seriously this story has an odor... no corroboration, no evidence of cause or intent (even if we assume the visit happened)... it's a bit much to swallow.
If I eat crow later, that's fine, but I'd like more coverage.
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.
Residential ISPs are not famed as being secured strongholds - and even if they were, all it takes is compromising a host in the target LAN - which, if they use a lot of functional-out-of-the-box network-aware gadgets, might be trivially easy too.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
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/
Sure, perhaps I worded it poorly but you didn't take the point I was trying to make, which is...
Anybody = any possible person
FBI, law enforcement, ISPs or any other group of people that doesn't contain every person in the world != Anybody
My point was that it's incorrect to say that it's easy for anybody to access someone else's search data because that statement is factually not true. If you dispute that then I invite you to construct a scenario in which I would be able to easily access your search data without your assistance and without you taking any action to facilitate that access.
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.
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
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.
They've spliced the fiber and are using deep packet inspection on the entire Internet.
Sounds like science fiction, sadly isn't.
They're using their grammar skills there.
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.
What is maddening, more than ironic, is that it appears NOT A SINGLE terrorist has been detected using the PRISM dragnet. One case in NYC was assisted, by PRISM, but that case was discovered by other means, and PRISM was used after the discovery.
In spite of the lies told before congress, those that have seen the real information have not been able to identify any cases where Prism has discovered anything of value that your typical FBI investigation would not have turned up also.
However, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, NSA Deputy Director John Inglis said U.S. bulk phone records spying was key in stopping just one terror plot, not the dozens officials had earlier said.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., accused Obama administration officials of overstating the successes of the far-reaching counter-terrorism program.
Leahy questioned earlier testimony by Alexander and other senior intelligence officials asserting the phone surveillance helped thwart 54 terrorist events.
Leahy told Inglis he realized after reviewing NSA material that assertion couldn't be made, "not by any stretch."
He said the NSA material didn't indicate "dozens or even several terrorist plots" had been thwarted by the domestic program.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
We have that already: we call it the Govenor's office in Illinois.
"I'll only put the tip in."
Admittedly, often found in proximity to #3.
... 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...
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.
Of course we only have their word for it. And how many of those 58 were instigated by the FBI as traps to try to catch wannabe terrorists who were never a real threat anyway?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
.I thought it was common knowledge that the search engines and the feds are all buddy buddy?
But, but...the NSA head and several Congressmen have assured us that they aren't blanket monitoring everyone. And surely they wouldn't lie!
That depends on how you define " is ".
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Yeah, just because they have lied about everything else doesn't mean they're lying about the "300" they "caught", right? Keep the faith. /sarcasm
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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?
Really? How is this different?
If anything its more alarming that any random police department has access to your searches.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Or the transparency he brought to the government was to make your life entirely transparent to the government.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
The probability of them being true at any instant in time is described by the following formula?
(4 - ITEM_NUMBER) / 4
(I mean, #1, #2, and #3 could be true...)
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
> . 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...
They could also pay for (web-bug) ads for those search terms, if they wanted to be perfectly legal about it.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Wonder if they would have got picked up so fast if they used anon search engines like startpage.com or duckduckgo.com?
Maybe, but then they wouldn't have actually FOUND anything!
Thanks, I'm here all week.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
"Google does not default to https"
It does when you've got HTTPS Everywhere (EFF plugin) installed on every PC you use :)
I guess we have no expectation of privacy when online.....
These are the times that try men's souls.
You should not expect privacy anywhere in the sense of being able to keep information private.
The real problem isn't so much privacy as who gets the information and what they do with it.
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!
Uh, they also stopped over five hundred attacks on the White House. The White House for fucks sakes! Don't you realize that your blind opposition to these benign programs is putting the President's daughters at risk? Do you even care? Of course, they can't tell us about it because if they did, the TERRORISTS might realize that their attacks failed and suspect that we stopped them. Got to be careful about that. But really, they happened. It's all in this classified document. We'll show the Intelligence Committees, and they can explain your representatives, who can assure you. Yes, you. We go through all this trouble to help you, and you want to call us a liar?
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.
That strategy has been in place since the time of Echelon being the program everyone was worried about.
I would say that everyone though needs to use a slightly different list every time they put out the list, otherwise the list would be immediately recognized and ignored.
Here is are some examples of the old Echelon list.
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi/noframes/read/703
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/31/what_are_those_words/
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread455848/pg1
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
What search engine did they use to search for pressure cookers and backpacks?
AccountKiller
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).
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.
What we need to do is remove the secret service from protecting the president. the position isn't worth it, he doesn't have any real influence. and if he is assassinated then nothing of value is lost to anyone but his family.
(waits in the living room for the knock on the door)
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
TOR enabled browser plugin, that generates spurious queries and referrers on every click.
Call it Chaff.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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?
My intent was to only poke holes in your "anybody" statement. I completely agree with the rest of your argument. To say that capturing someones search data, without great resources and skill at your disposal, would be simple or easy is a very naive claim.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
If you want people to take your written communication seriously, it's important not to look like a kid sending an instant message. Maybe I'm just assuming people want credibility?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
May I suggest we all go back to Sortition-government by elected officials chosen by lottery?
As a user of Adblocker plus I get almost zero ads.
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.
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.
Even more staggering when you realize this was carried out by a county Sheriff's department. So is this one department carrying out 100 raids per week? Assuming they're not the only PD doing it, we much have hundred of thousands of raids per year. Millions, maybe.
Color me skeptical.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
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.
DuckDuckGo is mostly an front-end to Bing, providing shallow anonymization. It would be a lot of work to figure out what https query to some DDG server matched what bing query. Yes, you could probably get the answer by capturing all metadata for the internet, and putting the pieces together, but even with the data it's non-trivial. I'd say DDG gives pretty good privacy.
I assume the case in TFA was just the feds telling Google long ago: "send us the IP address of anyone who makes any of the following queries" and more recently adding "pressure cookers and backpacks" to that list.
third choice if you type in Pressure Cooker (before you hit enter) is Pressure Cooker bomb. Thanks google!
Be seeing you...
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.
The Feds are fishing, nothing more. If they have to go to houses because "pressure cooker" and "backpack" was searched for, then it shows how much they suck at their job and are grasping at straws.
It's funny, because when I was a kid & teenager, this is something the government tells us that the communist do, check up on what you are buying or looking to buy. Yet here we are doing it in America, "The land of the free".
Free to get visited by the Feds when you do web searches.
Be seeing you...
thank you
I believe the term that would apply and coined on /. would be fupid ......
tapping the ass -> the ass is getting tapped
There is no excuse for your ignorance of economics, nor for your belief that taxation is not theft.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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
I cannot understand why this entire set of comments is devoted to the question of the feds monitoring traffic. To me, what happened does not appear to be any different from me searching for X on Google and then receiving targeted ads for X for days after when I use a Google service.
The advertisers make a simple commercial deal with Google to tell them about searches for their products. The Feds can make the same kind of deal with Google to tell them about searches for what they are interested in. (and I suppose they would not have to reveal that they are the Feds).
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!”
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.
4 words and a.
Backbone provider and a splitter.
More words. Unencrypted internet, completely available, unencrypted email, completely available.
The presentation that Snowden released yesterday mentioned that Facebook communications and even private messages were available. No mention of how encryption might interfere with data collection. The slides seemed to indicate that everything would be available, except it also highlighted that people running encryption were obvious targets.
It is clear that the surveillance has keyword filters that highlight possible threats. And in this particular case, there appears to have been no vetting of the "suspects".
Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss. The Who
Except the new bosses have better tools. Maybe everyone is confusing Constipation for Constitution... Or maybe they like D&D. I can't decide.
BlameBillCosby.com
Here's the new Oath for Federal employees (Office of Personnel Management):
I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constipation of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
The original, with a single major word change:
http://archive.opm.gov/constitution_initiative/oath.asp
Seriously, we get up in arms when the flag is burned, but when the Constitution of the United States is involved it appears to be toilet paper.
BlameBillCosby.com
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.
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.
Whooee! Sounds pretty big!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
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...
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
Yep... more coverage seems to have filled in the gaps. I remain crow-free... http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/pressure-cooker/
---Chip
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.
What makes you think he isnt a long serving government operative?
In that light, there are a large number of odd voting peculiarities that favored Romney in the Republican primaries over every other candidate (large precincts by vote heavily favored Romney usually at the expense of one single other candidate which was usual Ron Paul, but could also be Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich). That effect persisted even when attempts were made to control for degree of urbanization. I think it's some sort of fraud myself.
The paper I linked to calculates that Romney received roughly 1.2 million votes by this peculiarity. That's more than a 10% boost to his number of votes (10.0 million). Plus, he wouldn't have performed as well in the early primaries and caucuses (for example, IMHO placing a distant third in the Iowa caucus behind Rick Santorum and Ron Paul rather than a close second place behind Santorum) and tying with Ron Paul in New Hampshire. That sort of weak start might have even damned his campaign.
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
I will support and defend the Constipation of the United States
DEATH TO FIBRE!
"If everybody is thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking" - Gen. George S. Patton
The FBI would be very busy.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
TOR enabled browser plugin, that generates spurious queries and referrers on every click.
Why TOR-enabled? Seems redundant. To attract more attention?
Setting aside the encryption==flagging++ for a moment, I thought the idea wasn't to hide but to flood the sniffing being done on normal domestic HTTP web and email traffic. They haven't got the manpower to send officials out to investigate every Aunt Grace and JHS student that happened to get flagged by using the plugin.
In a practical sense, I don't see much of an upside to incorporating TOR. Well, other than to further congest the TOR network, a feature which I don't personally put in the "plus" column.
Call it Chaff.
Nice. Now, to come up with the next-gen plugin, HARM. :)
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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
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.
This. Politicians are a renewable resource.
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.
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.
Yes I do know how it works because it is very easily done. One of the easiest ways is with a transparent proxy on a bridge and then just search what turns up in the cache of your proxy on that bridge. Another slightly less easy way is to once again have a bridge and use tcpdump or similar on port 80 and read what's in the packets. There's other ways as well, the subject heading of this post is a bit of a clue about one of them.
SSL traffic is a bit trickier, but now that people have been socially engineered to accept a man in the middle attack thanks to those fucking stupid web accelerator boxes that do SSL instead of being sensible and passing it through unmolested, all you have to do is convince people that your listening device should be allowed to do it's snooping.
That's just off the top of my head and I'm not even one of the people that do such snooping. That's how easy it is.
They have backdoors into the communications carriers don't they? You can sniff any packet you want on a bridge.
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.
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
OK your right.
Instead of TOR, have an auto-discovery mesh, of all plugin-enabled browsers - Bittorrent fashion.
Then the requests are distributed to come from any random IP in the mesh.
That distributed piece seems unnecessarily complex to meet the chaffing use case, but eliminates certain accountability for individual queries.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
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'.
Neither one of your methods is scalable to monitor ALL google users. Also, you couldn't set up a bridge w/o having access to a privileged network first, at the client, isp, or server level.
That distributed piece seems unnecessarily complex to meet the chaffing use case, but eliminates certain accountability for individual queries.
I view this "Chaff" concept as analogous to an act of civil disobedience, in that the goal is not to avoid accountability, but to demand it.
Force the authorities to choose between trying to investigate/interrogate/raid/jail massive numbers of normal people that would result in widespread outrage & questioning of such policies & tactics by the government, or dropping such police state policies, actions, and tactics.
On a side note, respect to you for engaging with me in an interesting & thought-provoking discussion in a respectful, civilized, and reasoned manner. It's sadly becoming more and more of a rarity on /. and in the real world these days.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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
Sure!
Users could "opt-in" with the "risk switch" - a preference option...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Please, survey my posting history, for general use of the English language.
I'm sure that my consistent application of literary style, demonstrated level of grammatical sophistication and rhetorical soundness are more than adequate grounds upon which I may beg a little forgiveness over an occasional error in homophone usage, or mistaken contraction.
If not, you are cordially invited fuck yourself into pedantic rages.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
cf. "Hobson's Choice."
They do have privileged access to the telecommunications networks hence could put a device on every connection coming into a city let alone an ISP. Think of it as an extra router that copies all traffic to something that listens in addition to forwarding the traffic to where it is supposed to go. As I wrote above, not hard. The hard bit for you or me would be getting access to the line but government agencies are permitted to do that sort of thing without a lot of difficulty. It seems that when they are not permitted it's been happening anyway.
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.
I think you misunderstood who you were replying to. I was making the same argument.
Yep, when you have physical access to the ISP to plant your MITM hardware/software its do-able. I think we're saying the same thing which is basically if you have unlimited access to high level networks like the government seems to, google MITM is easy to do, but the original post I was responding to said ANYBODY can do google MITM, which is completely untrue.