Of course the NSA and other NS agencies were involved in the Catalano [View all]

[cali]

household being visited by an anti-terrorism task force for googling backpacks and pressure cookers. It absolutely beggars belief that the local police dept found these google searches on their own. One would have to have a sum total of NO critical thinking skills to believe that the local LI police monitored google searches. I realize that denial runs strong with some, but c'mon folks, don't be ridiculous.

From The Atlantic:

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We are awaiting a response from Suffolk County police and the Department of Homeland Security which operates an investigatory fusion center in the region.

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.

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http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/government-knocking-doors-because-google-searches/67864/#.UfqCSAXy7zQ.facebook