Big Boss, Not Big Brother, Spotted Long Island Family's 'Suspicious' Google Searches [View all]

[sufrommich]

On Wednesday morning, six law enforcement officers visited a house in Long Island. They were there to ask whether the residents — a married couple and their son — were involved in terrorism. The female half of the couple, freelance journalist Michele Catalano, who was at work when the visit occurred, blogged about the incident afterward, reporting that the “joint terrorism task force” officers were there because of her family’s Google GOOG +1.83% searches and other innocuous Internet activity.

“I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack,” she writes on Medium.com. Her 20-year-old son “read a CNN piece about how bomb making instructions are readily available on the internet.”

The officers asked her husband — “Do you have any bombs? … Do you own a pressure cooker? … Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb?” The idea that the feds are monitoring all of our Google searches and Internet activity to spot something like this fits in nicely with the current narrative about an all-seeing NSA that knows everything we do online, but the Internet activity was actually monitored by an employer not the government. The Suffolk County police department says that it questioned the family after getting a tip about suspicious computer searches on an ex-employee’s work computer.

So Catalano was right in a way. The Google searches did lead to the visit. But it was not a result of, as she wrote, “an alarm of sorts at the joint terrorism task force headquarters… and a crowd of task force workers huddled around a computer screen looking at our Google history.” Her family was being watched by Big Boss not Big Brother.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/01/employer-reported-suspicious-google-searches-that-led-to-terrorism-task-force-visit-for-long-island-family/