Serious concerns, many questions follow visit by law enforcement
The question is this: Who was monitoring the online Google searches of a Long Island, New York family in order to trigger a visit by six law enforcement officers asking if the family “had any bombs” in their homes?
Michelle Catalano and her family were shaken and made anxious on Wednesday after being visited by “six gentleman in casual clothes”—who turned out to be local police operating under the authority of, or least in connection with, federal agencies—and getting “peppered” with questions resulting from a series of coincidently entered search terms made on their home computer in recent weeks.
Catalano, who writes professionally, explained the whole story in her own words on her blog. In way of background, she explained:
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 “these times” 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 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.
The curious incident, of course, piqued immediate media interest, especially in the aftermath of recent revelations made possible by Edward Snowden about the manner in which the NSA accesses online databases of internet sites, including Google, Facebook, and others.
“Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked.”
As the police officers casually searched the home–looking on bookshelves, peaking in the kitchen–they asked the husband numerous questions. As Catalano recounts it:
Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked.
Following up on Catalano’s story, the Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt talked to a spokesman for the FBI Thursday who said its investigators were not involved directly, but that “she was visited by Nassau County police department … They were working in conjunction with Suffolk County police department.”
Exploring the possible connection between what happened to the Catalanos and recently exposed surveillance programs, The Atlantic’s Philip Bump writes:
Ever since details of the NSA’s surveillance infrastructure were leaked by Edward Snowden, the agency has been insistent on the boundaries of the information it collects. It is not, by law, allowed to spy on Americans — although there are exceptions of which it takes advantage. Its PRISM program, under which it collects internet content, does not include information from Americans unless those Americans are connected to terror suspects by no more than two other people. It collects metadata on phone calls made by Americans, but reportedly stopped collecting metadata on Americans’ internet use in 2011. So how, then, would the government know what Catalano and her husband were searching for?
It’s possible that one of the two of them is tangentially linked to a foreign terror suspect, allowing the government to review their internet activity. After all, that “no more than two other people” ends up covering millions of people. 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. On Wednesday, The Guardian reported on XKeyscore, a program eerily similar to Facebook search that could clearly allow an analyst to run a search that picked out people who’d done searches for those items from the same location. How those searches got into the government’s database is a question worth asking; how the information got back out seems apparent.
Whatever the trail of surveillance and assessment that led law enforcement to the Catalano house, the result is the same and is reflected best by Michelle Catalano herself.
“Mostly I felt a great sense of anxiety,” she said of the incident. “This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.”
And concluded, “All I know is if I’m going to buy a pressure cooker in the near future, I’m not doing it online.”
Source: commondreams
Wow how effing stupid! I expect they will come to my house. Because after the “bombing” obviously planned by the FBI or some other three letter organization. I too looked up the dimensions of pressure cookers and the back packs supposedly used (and carried by the spec ops types as seen in the videos and pictures of the bombing.
JUST TO SEE if a pressure cooker would actually fit. Because I suspected immediately that this was another planned false flag event and personally I believe with the added revelation that the Boston Globe tweeted when the explosion would take place and where it would take place within the minute of it taking place.
Well it did, then I learned that the Spec Ops types called “The Craft” were also carrying LIVE explosives during a drill . . . . Hmmm then two brain cells rubbed together and I became convinced that b u l l s h i t had taken place. Once Again.
I would suspect that if a FBI employee does a search on “pressure cookers and back packs”, fluorescent glowing red flags with blaring alarms should go up because the FBI is well known for “setting up” entrapment style events just so they can take credit for “foiling” them. That way the US Government has a false flag reason to continue to finance a “war on terror” that creates much more terror than it fails to stop. That is if real terrorists exist instead of the home grown government financed types.
If we consider that recent US Foreign Policy supported by democratic action has created terrorism and that those locals who figured out the source decided to get some action in Benghazi and out glorious leadership decided to let their patsies die instead of supporting American soldiers, dead men tell no tales.
You are not snowing me with the b u l l s h i t. I am just wondering which scam you will use to take me out? I have no intent on suicide, I have never cause an accident, I do not do drugs and never intend to, I am not “racially motivated” and I never go into unsafe locations. So I quite expect trumped up charges or an “accident” to take me out.
Since I am disabled I never “cross the street” I rarely drive during rush hour and suspect the VA will kill me off through some medical mishap. Happens all the time you know.
Pie, cake, yellow, NSA, NASA, FBI, .gov, airplane, desk jockey, politician, baby raping elite, pedophile, Vatican, scam, (You know it will not be long before every word becomes a watch word.) Welcome to 1984, Soylent Green is people.
vet, they’re definitely watching you…and prob have been for some time now.
pressure cooker, boeing 747, US embassy, backpack, Amtrak, cable, .22, flight, white house, box cutter, Greyhound Bus. LOL. come get me you waste of space mother fcukers.
you google those things enough time, your wish just may come true….
Insane