Think mass government surveillance won't ever impact you? Think again.
Google Pressure Cookers and Backpacks, Get a Visit from the Cops (The Atlantic Wire)
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 prompts the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?
...
"[T]hey were peppering my husband with questions. 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. ..."
We previously discussed how surveillance agencies have been watching social media, and suggested -- in the spirit of the old NSA line eater -- renewing the practice of loading posts with interesting keywords. Perhaps we should do the same with Google searches. If you'd like to keep the folks at XKeyscore entertained, try these links:
- http://www.google.com/#q=pressure+cooker+backpack
- http://www.google.com/#q=dirty+bomb+north+korea
- http://www.google.com/#q=NSA+sucks+DHS+sucks+nuclear+fuck+you+get+a+real+job
You can see the pattern -- please add similar ones, or just copy these, to your own blog or Facebook page or whatever. (Web spiders following those links should also make for some fun.)
If you haven't stopped using Google for your real searches yet, you ought to. Switch your searches to Duck Duck Go or Startpage. If you must use GMail or other advertising-supported (which is not "free", but that's a different rant) web mail, use a POP3 or IMAP client to download your messages, don't leave them on Google's servers -- mail stored at their site has fewer legal (and practical) protections against spying.
Oh, and the answer to "May we search your house/car/purse/backpack/body/whatever" is always, always, always "No, with all due respect I do not consent to a search. Come back with a warrant. Am I free to leave?" and the answer to any questions (beyond "Can I see your driver's licence?" if you're driving, and perhaps "What is your name?", but even that second one is debatable) is "I'm sorry, but, respectfully, I have been advised to not answer questions put to me by law enforcement officers. Am I free to leave?" Yes, standing up for your rights is a scary, and cops will pressure you, even flat-out lie about how it's in your interests to let them trample your liberties. But freedom isn't free.
Update: The Atlantic Wire follows up with a statement from the Suffolk County PD: "Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. The former employee’s computer searches took place on this employee’s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks.”" While the data may not have originated from XKeyscore in this case, this is still no justification for police action: in the days after the Boston bombing many people read up on how the bombs might have worked.