11 ms·

http://reason.com/blog/2013/08/01/innocent-couple-gets-visited-by-feds-aft http://reason.com/blog/2013/08/01/innocent-couple-gets-visit... http://www.nydailyne

by akerro 11y ago

http://reason.com/blog/2013/08/01/innocent-couple-gets-visited-by-feds-aft http://reason.com/blog/2013/08/01/innocent-couple-gets-visit... http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/long-island-woman-claims-online-search-pressure-cooker-helped-prompt-visit-feds-article-1.1415101 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/long-island-woman-c... >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.

dsfyu404ed 11y ago
I can see that having gone a totally different way if it wasn't a upper middle class family. >cops show up at multi-family house in blue collar neighborhood >guy in tank top chewing tobacco answers door >"can we step inside and discuss some stuff" >locks door, steps outside, closes door >"ain't nobody with a badge going in there without a warrant and after what happened to Jim who lives upstairs nobody around here talks to you people without a lawyer" >cops escalate situation >guy they're talking to does something that plays into their trap >police beat him senseless, taze him a few times, arrest him, wind up charging him with everything and then dropping everything except some circularly defined charge And all that could easily happen to a middle class white guy. God forbid you're not white or Muslim...
throwanem 11y ago
It is dishonest to represent this as an instance of "the search engine police" turning up as a result of NSA snooping. From the NY Daily News article you linked: >“Somewhere out there, someone was watching,” Michele Catalano wrote on the “Medium” blog[...] > The Suffolk County Police Department said it sent detectives to her East Meadow home Wednesday after a Bay Shore-based computer company reported suspicious computer searches by a “recently released” employee. > “We found out ... that the searches involved also things my husband looked up at his old job,” Catalano wrote Thursday night in a separate blog post on “Open Areas,” her personal site. In sum: Mr. Catalano and his former employer got into a flap presumably related in some way to the employer becoming "former"; said employer, which sounds like a pretty lousy place to work if this is the kind of shit they pull, tried to SWAT the Catalanos in the best 4chan style; Mrs. Catalano, seeing an opportunity to grab some headlines and maybe a touch of lasting notoriety for her otherwise entirely forgettable online presence, made this out to be something almost entirely other than what it was; the post-Snowden online media grabbed hold of it for five minutes, then realized how they'd been played and turned on Mrs. Catalano [1] for thinking she could put one over on them. I don't see how the case against ubiquitous Internet surveillance can be effectively bolstered with dishonest representations of rather trivial events. [1] http://www.wired.com/2013/08/pressure-cooker/ http://www.wired.com/2013/08/pressure-cooker/

by akerro 11y ago

dsfyu404ed 11y ago

I can see that having gone a totally different way if it wasn't a upper middle class family. >cops show up at multi-family house in blue collar neighborhood >guy in tank top chewing tobacco answers door >"can we step inside and discuss some stuff" >locks door, steps outside, closes door >"ain't nobody with a badge going in there without a warrant and after what happened to Jim who lives upstairs nobody around here talks to you people without a lawyer" >cops escalate situation >guy they're talking to does something that plays into their trap >police beat him senseless, taze him a few times, arrest him, wind up charging him with everything and then dropping everything except some circularly defined charge And all that could easily happen to a middle class white guy. God forbid you're not white or Muslim...

throwanem 11y ago

It is dishonest to represent this as an instance of "the search engine police" turning up as a result of NSA snooping. From the NY Daily News article you linked: >“Somewhere out there, someone was watching,” Michele Catalano wrote on the “Medium” blog[...] > The Suffolk County Police Department said it sent detectives to her East Meadow home Wednesday after a Bay Shore-based computer company reported suspicious computer searches by a “recently released” employee. > “We found out ... that the searches involved also things my husband looked up at his old job,” Catalano wrote Thursday night in a separate blog post on “Open Areas,” her personal site. In sum: Mr. Catalano and his former employer got into a flap presumably related in some way to the employer becoming "former"; said employer, which sounds like a pretty lousy place to work if this is the kind of shit they pull, tried to SWAT the Catalanos in the best 4chan style; Mrs. Catalano, seeing an opportunity to grab some headlines and maybe a touch of lasting notoriety for her otherwise entirely forgettable online presence, made this out to be something almost entirely other than what it was; the post-Snowden online media grabbed hold of it for five minutes, then realized how they'd been played and turned on Mrs. Catalano [1] for thinking she could put one over on them. I don't see how the case against ubiquitous Internet surveillance can be effectively bolstered with dishonest representations of rather trivial events. [1] http://www.wired.com/2013/08/pressure-cooker/ http://www.wired.com/2013/08/pressure-cooker/