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?"
How'd the government know what they were Googling? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How'd the government know what they were Googli (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just glad the phrase "begs the question" wasn't used in this regard.
Refuse the search? (Score:5, Insightful)
This raises another question. What happens when these people refuse to answer questions or allow a search of their home?
Let's all Google together. (Score:5, Insightful)
We should all Google 'pressure cooker' and 'backpacks'. Let's send them for a spin.
Re:How'd the government know what they were Googli (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sure they are aware, of a a lot more things. Damn pressure cooker backpacks...
Re:Bush (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wireshark (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that google.com defaults to https. So whoever was wiresharking had Google's SSL key or some other kind of inside access.
Re:Was local police, not Feds. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh well just the local police, that's fine then.
[/sarcasm]
Re:Wireshark (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy has standing to sue (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:They can't get all of us (Score:1, Insightful)
They can't get all of us at the same time. Making a long list of people to get, whenever they please, is just providing them job security.
Re:Obummer the Messiah will save us! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I know what I am doing when I get home (Score:5, Insightful)
$i = 0
while $i = 0
wget ”http://www.google.com/search?q=Pressure+Cooker"
wget ”http://www.google.com/search?q=backpack"
'Nuff Said
When I see an angry dog, I like to poke at it with a stick, too. Rational things happen every time!
Re:Wireshark (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you guys not been following US news for the last two months?
Re:BAD article, better source, and other notes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Shame on her husband for allowing jack booted thugs into their home. Never consent to a search, and never speak to the police, except to assert your right to remain silent and request a lawyer. Every citizen who consents to these searches encourages them to do more.
Re:Bush (Score:5, Insightful)
Well if you've nothing to hide... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:has been happening for a while (Score:5, Insightful)
United Stasi of America. It's here. X-Keyscore proves it can't be avoided almost in any way.
Full take of all of the data is constantly analyzed. By now the responsibility must have been given to a faceless algorithm, so there is no one to sue, no one to accuse. People around the machine are just supporting staff, like those working at the concentration camps - who just followed their orders given by the machine.
Re:Seems obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
See, "metadata" is a slippery term.
Go ahead and do an innocuous google search. Once the results show up, take a look at the URL you've accessed.
There it is: your search terms right there, (in human-readable format, even) in the URL itself. Is a URL metadata? I'm sure the NSA would say "yes"
So, Google doesn't need to be complicit in any way. This is all unencrypted stuff that could easily be filtered and could theoretically be defended as being "metadata"
Kinda makes me wonder what else you might call metadata. Are the SMS messages that piggyback on phone packets metadata? (I'll admit I don't really know anything about that so this is just speculation)
I'd be very interested in other people's opinions on things we think of as communications content that could be argued as being metadata. Thoughts?
Cops? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How'd the government know what they were Googli (Score:5, Insightful)
You people really have too much time on your hands.
Re:Let it go, Dipshit... (Score:5, Insightful)
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. . . "
Re:Refuse the search? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's interesting that they talked to the people at all, even though they showed up looking like they weren't there to talk.
I just rewatched War Games the other day and had to laugh at the way the FBI was portrayed apprehending Broderick. They were supposed to look all intimidating, but they seemed so polite compared to how such an operation would go down today. His dog survived the operation, his parents weren't pissing themselves on the floor at gunpoint, there was no profanity yelled at anyone. And he was a national security threat.
Ah, those were such civilized times.
Re:Bush (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the statement "changing the puppet doesn't change the puppeteer" begs the question, "is the president a puppet under control of a puppeteer?" The statement begs that unanswered question by assuming the answer to be yes.
If the answer to that question is "yes," then we would raise the question, "who is the puppeteer?"
Re:Wireshark (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bush (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that people can criticize Obama without having wanted to vote for Romney, right? People can actually have views beyond that false dilemma.
So no-one should ever investigate anything (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Proof! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Did you even RTFA? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Refuse the search? (Score:5, Insightful)
"You are not required, nor should you allow any law enforcement officer into your home or business without a search warrant."
And just how difficult is it these days for the Feds to get a search warrant from the invisible national security legal system?
Re:Duh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wireshark (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:Bush (Score:4, Insightful)
It might be a false dichotomy, but it's not a false dilemma. All your choices are bad. Voting for someone who has no chance of getting enough votes to get into office might be more respectable, but it's still a bad choice too. That is, unless you're going by the original Greek roots and that saying dilemma means there are only two choices. That's not really the current meaning in English, though.
Re:Bush (Score:5, Insightful)
The founding fathers never foresaw global megacorporations with concentrations of wealth and power that exceeds that of some actual countries.
You've obviously never heard of The British East India Company [wikipedia.org].
Re:One thing the article skipped for criteria (Score:2, Insightful)
The Boston bombers had nothing to do with either Korea nor China.
So you're saying that they should only pay attention to potential bombers who are identical in EVERY aspect, even though islamic terrorism is not tied to any one country?
"Oh sorry sir, I didn't see you lacked curly hair. By all means continue wiring up that dynamite and timer, I'll be on my way".
Re:So no-one should ever investigate anything (Score:5, Insightful)
A) (The number of pressure cooker bombs made) / (the number of pressure cookers sold) is virtually 0.
B) (The number of backpacks used to bomb something) / (the number of backpacks sold) is virtually 0.
Even taking A and B together, (the number of pressure cooker bombs transported in backpacks) / (the number of people who own both pressure cookers and backpacks) is virtually 0.
A and B are meaningless. Worse than meaningless, they waste resources that could be put toward investigating real threats.
C) With all the news about pressure cooker bombs, there are lots of people, in the 10s of millions, who have searched for what a pressure cooker bomb is, myself included.
D) Lots of people travel. Neither China nor S. Korea are hotbeds of terrorist activity. N. Korea is all but impossible to enter from either of those countries.
And for gods sake, most importantly, absolutely none of this should have been known by any law enforcement agency because they had no probable cause to start an investigation in the first place. There is a serious problem when everyone American citizen's internet activity and travel history are being constantly monitored.
Always preventing the last attack (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:has been happening for a while (Score:5, Insightful)
What exactly does it mean to have a right if the government can punish you for exercising it?
Re:Wait a second... (Score:4, Insightful)
Right. They record your phone call, make a text transcription and then discard the recording (unless you're on a special watchlist or trip any red flags). The text is just the metadata!
No, they'll have to sue (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Terrorist plot #57... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bush (Score:5, Insightful)
If you folks on the right had asked one of us *liberals* back in '08, we'd have told you Obama wasn't one of us. He's essentially what would have been a centrist Republican thirty years ago. These were people, like Bob Dole, that we liberals didn't agree with, but could respect and work with. In fact, "Obamacare" pretty much follows the private sector oriented reform plans of Bob Dole. If Obama were a liberal he'd have gone with single payer, and negotiated tough price concessions with pharmaceutical manufacturers (which is the source of America's runaway heath care spending). You'd have seen banks regulated or broken apart, and criminal investigations in response to the financial crisis of '08, not an attempt to put the system back together again the way it was before the crash.
In fact Obama is very much the kind of president Dole would have been: an economic pragmatist, a diplomatic multilateralist, and an aggressive user of military force where he perceives an imminent threat to national security.
If you want to stop state intrusion into private affairs, you've got to stop being afraid, and convince others around you to stop being afraid. The more fear there is in the political climate, the more impunity the government has in its actions.
Liberals got behind Obama in '08 for the same reason we got behind Obamacare: we backed the best alternative achievable in a climate of fear -- a climate, by the way, that makes the state internal security apparatus feel empowered to do anything it wants in the search for terrorists.
Re:Refuse the search? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because most people have a sense of 'justice' that is little more than a polite cover for the urge to see criminals tortured. They'll support just about any abuse of police power, so long as it isn't directed at them.
Re:This guy has standing to sue (Score:5, Insightful)
It's to stop people from clogging the courts in protest. It'd be really annoying if the government passed a law of slightly dubious validity and a thousand activists decided to file suit against it. With so many cases going on at once, it's inevitable courts would issue conflicting orders. While such a process could be used to stop unconstitutional laws, it could also be used to stall laws that are perfectly valid but have a dedicated opposition.
Re:Wireshark (Score:2, Insightful)
"Google does not default to https"
It does when you've got HTTPS Everywhere (EFF plugin) installed on every PC you use :)
Re:How'd the government know what they were Googli (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:How'd the government know what they were Googli (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:has been happening for a while (Score:4, Insightful)