Google Pressure Cookers and Backpacks: Get a Visit From the Feds 923
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?"
Re:Refuse the search? (Score:4, Informative)
BAD article, better source, and other notes... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [medium.com], 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.
Re:has been happening for a while (Score:5, Informative)
This needs to stop.
When they come to your house you tell them to fuck off and come back with a warrant. Cooperating only encourages them.
One thing the article skipped for criteria (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Wireshark (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Refuse the search? (Score:5, Informative)
This raises another question. What happens when these people refuse to answer questions or allow a search of their home?
IANAL, but I've done quite a bit of reading about this topic. The rule (at least in the US) is very simple: You are not required, nor should you allow any law enforcement officer into your home or business without a search warrant. Needless to say, you should not be talking to them at the front door either. They are not going to bust your door down, and it's likely they will not return.
Keep in mind that you should never talk to a federal agent without your attorney's advice. The reason? It is a federal crime to lie to a federal agent, and there are many cases of people being charged with lying rather than the original crime for which they were being investigated.
Don't take my word for it. Read the words of a former government attorney [gunowners.com] (scroll down to "The Raid"). There are any number of good articles and videos authored by attorneys. Here's another one [publiceye.org] that's worth a read.
Not necessarily flagged from their Google Searches (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Duh? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Wireshark (Score:5, Informative)
Or if you use the proper extension [eff.org].
Re:I know what I am doing when I get home (Score:4, Informative)
Re:has been happening for a while (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wireshark (Score:4, Informative)
How ironic it is to see the first post under "You may like to read:" be DuckDuckGo: Illusion of Privacy [slashdot.org]...
Remember:
Knowledge is power, but he who controls the information reigns supreme. --Hackers Creed
Google as it used to be (Score:4, Informative)
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).
Re:Refuse the search? (Score:3, Informative)
Martha Stewart for one.
In addition remember, federal agents will not record their interview with you, they merely take notes. So when they charge you with lying, it's their word against yours. Who do you think the judge and jury will believe?
Just sayin'.
Re:Proof! (Score:3, Informative)
That's 'cause they were probably white.
Nature of the Internet: Information exploitation (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Inflamitory reporting (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:BAD article, better source, and other notes... (Score:5, Informative)
An FBI spokesman confirmed the Guardian's report [theguardian.com].
Article is wrong: NOT due to Google searches... (Score:3, Informative)
She posted pictures of M-66 explosives publicly on her Facebook account.
Google Plus posting on the topic [google.com]
The facebook photo in question [facebook.com]
Re:Not necessarily flagged from their Google Searc (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Bush (Score:5, Informative)
You are employing the modern misuse of the phrase. It does not mean that a question "begs to be asked." Questions cannot beg.
But people can.
"Begging the question" essentially means you are begging the audience to grant you assumptions without requiring you to prove them (generally falsely).
If I were to argue, "To reduce crime we must build more prisons to lock up minorities," that statement begs several questions be answered in a way favorable to my argument, but that I have not proven. Are minorities committing crimes? Will building prisons to lock them up reduce this crime? I haven't proven those things, but I'm just skipping over that messy business and begging the audience to act as if those questions were asked and answered in favor of my argument.
It's basically how politicians speak at all times.
Re:Bush (Score:5, Informative)
The founding fathers never foresaw global megacorporations with concentrations of wealth and power that exceeds that of some actual countries.
And the obvious counterexample to that claim is the East India Company, which was a global megacorporation of the 18th century. Recall that one of the defining events of the US revolution was the Boston Tea Party which was a protest against a tea tax and trade monopoly which was imposed to assist the East India Company. The tea that they happened to dump was East India tea.
And at the time, the East India Company had power far beyond any modern corporation or crime organization with a valuable opium trade with China (often illegally), a standing army in India, and considerable backing from the English government who saw them as a tool to increase English power in India and elsewhere.
So the founding fathers had a working example of such a global megacorporation in their time and had already crossed paths with it.
Re:Refuse the search? (Score:5, Informative)
Lawyers have repeatedly told me (1) never talk to the cops unless you have a lawyer. (2) Never give them permission to enter your home without a warrant. (3) Never give them permission to search your home without a warrant.
Once they get inside your home, they can look around and possibly find something illegal.
The husband's answer should have been, "Give me your business card and I'll get back to you after I've talked to a lawyer."
Yes, it's tempting to get rid of them by explaining that you're not doing anything wrong.
But a lot of people who didn't think they were doing anything wrong have wound up in jail. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_C._Butler [wikipedia.org]
Re:Bush (Score:5, Informative)
While enshrining the right to vote solely in the hands of wealthy, white land owners
That's a crass, unfounded lie. They were protecting the right to vote for wealthy, white, land-owning males.
From their employer, it sounds like (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [theatlanticwire.com]
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.