8 ms·

Employer Tipped Off Police In Pressure Cooker/Backpack-gate, Not Google

187 points by coloneltcb 13y ago

mtgx 13y ago
American culture is becoming so sad, especially when compared to what it used to be. Now everyone might turn each other in for suspecting they are terrorists. It reminds me of the communist days when people turned each other in for speaking against the Party or the President. Such culture is a lot harder to remove than one single tyrant. Very sad.
- sologoub 13y ago
  This is not new, but rather wider-spread and with newer technology backing the paranoia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
- dromidas 13y ago
  We'll just have to sail to a new continent and then throw barrels of McDonalds Cheeseburgers off the nearest port into the ocean.
- pekk 13y ago
  This isn't about political dissent against Obama. People are not being literally blacklisted for having the wrong politics. Are you paying any attention at all?
gcb0 13y ago
And the damage control starts. Also, why are we reading tech crunch for actual news? as someone puts eloquently on the top comment: """ random_eddie2 1 minute ago "It turns out either Catalano or her husband were conducting these searches from a work computer." That is speculation, unsupported by the PD's press release. The former employee was not identified in the press release, and we know of at least THREE people whose home the investigators went to: Catalano, her husband, and her twenty-year-old son. If you're not going to do enough journalism (you know, picking up the phone and making calls to obtain verifiable facts) to establish something as basic as this, you should probably just not say anything at all. """
- jmduke 13y ago
  How is that quote unsupported by the press release? The press release states: "The former employee's searches took place on this employee's workplace computer."
- droithomme 13y ago
  The police police report says the employer (singular) noticed the searches (plural) made on a workplace computer and reported to the FBI. The context is a case where the wife searched for "pressure cooker", and the husband for "backpack" at the same time. Has it been established that both the husband and the wife worked for the same company? No need to respond, the police department is claiming this unnamed company that the wife or possibly the husband works for says that it was "the employee" who made both searches at the workplace on the company owned computer. > 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.”
  - md224 13y ago
    The wife's search was irrelevant, as the report states the search was for "pressure cooker bombs" not "pressure cooker". So we really have no idea who searched for that one.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Do I understand properly that you're still seeking an angle in which the USG or some agent of it got access to this family's Google searches?
  - pkinsky 13y ago
    It's not implausible that the employer's tip led to a full trawl of the family's stored online history. Which, with what I'm sure is a shockingly high false positive rate, found cause for suspicion.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      We also can't disprove that it was the Roswell aliens that secretly control the Trilateral Commission that were behind the whole story.
tptacek 13y ago
I'm shocked, just shocked, that this turned out not to be the FBI dragnetting Google searches.
- thezilch 13y ago
  I didn't read the original reports, but who started the "dragnet" talks? You? The premise is still true; this woman and her family were questioned due to the keywords they were searching. Someone did piece together her family's searches, and that got them a knock on their door by an SUV team, and the FBI was involved.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    The "original report", the Catalano blog post on Medium, overtly said that the US Government was monitoring her family's Google searches, and she followed that up on Twitter with a direct accusation that the FBI was behind it, followed by a "correction" that it was "the JTTF". That original report has now been debunked. But it won't be retracted. Print a retraction and the NSA wins.
    - thezilch 13y ago
      Link to that diff? Her medium blog reads... Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. Someone whose job it is to piece together the things people do on the internet raised the red flag when they saw our search history. Nothing overt about USG watching Google's query IO. I don't think it's a stretch to confuse the FBI with the JTTF, nor that it's a huge leap between the efforts taken against her family and "someone [...] [piecing] together things people do on the internet." Everything she said happened, you just interpreted it incorrectly and started us down the wrong conversation. Frankly, I think it's pretty telling that we're so on edge about how we are interpreting these findings.
      - saraid216 13y ago
        > Frankly, I think it's pretty telling that we're so on edge about how we are interpreting these findings. Well, you might be. I just got bored of seeing the headline, which I dismissed as implausible immediately and didn't bother clicking on the linkbait. So I haven't been able to join in the circus act here on HN.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
md224 13y ago
From the Medium blog post: > 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. From the Suffolk County PD: > 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.” Still not sure who was searching for what, but it looks like the author's search for "pressure cookers" was a red herring... the actual triggering search was for "pressure cooker bombs." I'm guessing it was probably the author or her husband (whoever "the subject" was) just searching for information after the Boston Marathon bombings. The author should've mentioned that she or her husband searched for "pressure cooker bombs," but I'm willing to assume she either didn't know or forgot that such a search took place.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  Just FYI: Typing "pressure cooker " into google search autocompletes to "pressure cooker bomb"
  - droithomme 13y ago
    Great find! You are correct, it ranks even higher than "pressure cooker recipes" in the Google autocomplete. Does Google autocomplete usually indicate something is a common search term? Undoubtedly "pressure cooker recipes" is a common search term used by people who have received a pressure cooker as a gift. But "pressure cooker bomb" seems to be a more common search, is that a reasonable conclusion from the Google autocomplete behavior? https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/106230?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/106230?hl=en Google says "The search queries that you see as part of autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all web users and the content of web pages indexed by Google." So two things. Perhaps there are many more pages dealing with bombs than recipes though. Let's find out. "pressure cooker recipes" reports "About 6,360,000 results". "pressure cooker bomb" reports "About 1,720,000 results". Thus Google believes there are six times as many pages dealing with pressure cooker recipes as there are pages dealing with pressure cooker bombs. Therefore, given that they state that both content and search activity are used to form the autocomplete ranking, searching for "pressure cooker bomb" is a fairly common and unremarkable activity. This is not surprising given that it has been in the news a lot this last year. Should then searching for common things that many people search for and which are relevant to recent news be considered evidence that one is engaging in terrorist activity and should be investigated and their house search? I would say, no, that is not reasonable.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- tptacek 13y ago
  Yes, this is definitely psy-ops. Don't drink the water, either; it has fluoride in it.
guelo 13y ago
What kind of company has a web search triggered alert that trawls for terrorism related keywords and secretly reports you to the police? They should have said who the employer was so people can avoid working there.
- freehunter 13y ago
  Honestly, I work in information security and for a long time I was the sole information security analyst (the person who watches the logs and correlation events from the security intelligence monitor) for a 14k employee company. Even if I cared what people were searching for, to monitor Google searches on employee computers would have taken a fair bit of resources that there's not a great business need for unless you actually are interested in what your employees search for. I'm talking having the capabilities to man-in-the-middle an SSL certificate as it passes your proxy server. It's not impossible, it's not even difficult, but it does have a CPU impact on the server that's great enough that you'd think twice about enabling that feature unless you had a specific purpose to build your servers to enable that feature. That alone makes me curious. I was more concerned with watching logins to the PCI environment and checking firewall and anti-virus logs. I didn't have time to care what the users were searching for. I'd like to know what company this is only because apparently they're so overflowing with cash that they can hire staff to monitor Google searches and report them to the FBI. I really need to put "has no moral compass" on my resume...
  - lotharbot 13y ago
    There's a much simpler narrative than "company devotes substantial resources to monitor all google searches": The person was apparently a very recent former employee. It's pretty standard procedure to log out a recently departed employee's accounts and revoke all of their permissions, and it's not a big stretch to assume some sort of simple audit of their recent activity. Did they have any partially-completed work sitting on their desktop? Were they still logged in to the billing system? Did they have anything checked out? I can imagine an IT guy at a smallish company sitting down at the console and finding a browser window still open with a handful of work tabs, and a tab of google search results, and noticing the google search results are a little bit suspicious.
robryan 13y ago
Why was the employer going through a former employees browsing history?
- lotharbot 13y ago
  It's fairly common, particularly with a just-terminated employee or one who left on bad terms, to review any activity they undertook between "we're letting you go" and the last time they actually left the building. Because occasionally, just-terminated employees try to get revenge. I'm not saying this is definitely the case here. Just noting a circumstance under which "checked everything the employee did recently" makes a lot of sense -- and a circumstance under which "searched for pressure cooker bomb information" might appear suspicious, and might lead someone to contact law enforcement.
minimax 13y ago
If you see something suspicious taking place then report that behavior or activity to local law enforcement or in the case of emergency call 9-1-1. http://www.dhs.gov/if-you-see-something-say-something http://www.dhs.gov/if-you-see-something-say-something These types of reports always increase after incidents like the Boston bombings.
- autodidakto 13y ago
  About a year after 9/11, I was taking pictures of a protestant church in suburban New York as part of a loan assessment. The cops showed up and told us someone had reported us as suspicious. He mentioned something about a mosque being nearby but I didn't know if that meant we were supposedly from the mosque or going after the mosque next. On the same trip, but later in Philadelphia, I was hassled by a rent-a-cop outside of a random building for carrying a camera. If the goal of terrorism is to terrorize the public with irrational fears (leading to wild accusations against each other, and demanding that their government "do something, anything"), 9/11 was a success.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    Bob Dylan can't even take a walk before a concert: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-207_162-5243217.html http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-207_162-5243217.html
ignostic 13y ago
This is what happens when you have bloggers writing exclusive news rather than journalists who know how to verify facts. Don't get me wrong: blogging has generally been a good thing for the spread of information and exchange of ideas. If bloggers want to start running down leads and researching exclusives, though, they'd best learn to fact check.
- icebraining 13y ago
  This wasn't a blogger writing an exclusive news, this was someone writing a story that (allegedly) happened to herself.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
quantumpotato_ 13y ago
It's not on http://apps.suffolkcountyny.gov/police/morepress.htm http://apps.suffolkcountyny.gov/police/morepress.htm (yet?)
MrKurtz 13y ago
The most disturbing and disappointing part of the whole story is how it spread without even the slightest attempt to do any journalism work, and now that the truth was uncovered hardly anyone is publishing or updating originals with corrections and retractions: http://www.techmeme.com/130801/p52#a130801p52 http://www.techmeme.com/130801/p52#a130801p52 It's fucking shameful.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- dreamfactory 13y ago
  Is this report any more verified?
  - ewoodrich 13y ago
    There is a direct statement from the local police department. http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/screen-shot-2013-08-01-at-3-46-53-pm.png?w=640 http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/screen-s...
  - MrKurtz 13y ago
    http://www.bnowire.com/inbox/?id=1953 http://www.bnowire.com/inbox/?id=1953
detcader 13y ago
Where is the press release exactly? It doesn't seem to be on Suffolk County's website [1], which is what TechCrunch links to. EDIT: the author said in the comments section that the SCPD emailed them the release. [1] http://apps.suffolkcountyny.gov/police/morepress.htm http://apps.suffolkcountyny.gov/police/morepress.htm
octotoad 13y ago
Do we really have to append 'gate' to every potentially controversial news event? Looks and sounds even more ridiculous than usual in this case.
rlwolfcastle 13y ago
People were getting ahead of themselves in this story. It never made any sense that if this was occurring one hundred times a day that it would not have been mentioned somewhere else before now given the current focus on privacy and the NSA.
vitaltao 13y ago
Glad to see thoughtcrimes are being properly investigated, in any case.

187 points by coloneltcb 13y ago

mtgx 13y ago

American culture is becoming so sad, especially when compared to what it used to be. Now everyone might turn each other in for suspecting they are terrorists. It reminds me of the communist days when people turned each other in for speaking against the Party or the President. Such culture is a lot harder to remove than one single tyrant. Very sad.

sologoub 13y ago
This is not new, but rather wider-spread and with newer technology backing the paranoia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
dromidas 13y ago
We'll just have to sail to a new continent and then throw barrels of McDonalds Cheeseburgers off the nearest port into the ocean.
pekk 13y ago
This isn't about political dissent against Obama. People are not being literally blacklisted for having the wrong politics. Are you paying any attention at all?

gcb0 13y ago

And the damage control starts. Also, why are we reading tech crunch for actual news? as someone puts eloquently on the top comment: """ random_eddie2 1 minute ago "It turns out either Catalano or her husband were conducting these searches from a work computer." That is speculation, unsupported by the PD's press release. The former employee was not identified in the press release, and we know of at least THREE people whose home the investigators went to: Catalano, her husband, and her twenty-year-old son. If you're not going to do enough journalism (you know, picking up the phone and making calls to obtain verifiable facts) to establish something as basic as this, you should probably just not say anything at all. """

jmduke 13y ago
How is that quote unsupported by the press release? The press release states: "The former employee's searches took place on this employee's workplace computer."
droithomme 13y ago
The police police report says the employer (singular) noticed the searches (plural) made on a workplace computer and reported to the FBI. The context is a case where the wife searched for "pressure cooker", and the husband for "backpack" at the same time. Has it been established that both the husband and the wife worked for the same company? No need to respond, the police department is claiming this unnamed company that the wife or possibly the husband works for says that it was "the employee" who made both searches at the workplace on the company owned computer. > 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.”
- md224 13y ago
  The wife's search was irrelevant, as the report states the search was for "pressure cooker bombs" not "pressure cooker". So we really have no idea who searched for that one.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Do I understand properly that you're still seeking an angle in which the USG or some agent of it got access to this family's Google searches?
- pkinsky 13y ago
  It's not implausible that the employer's tip led to a full trawl of the family's stored online history. Which, with what I'm sure is a shockingly high false positive rate, found cause for suspicion.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    We also can't disprove that it was the Roswell aliens that secretly control the Trilateral Commission that were behind the whole story.

tptacek 13y ago

I'm shocked, just shocked, that this turned out not to be the FBI dragnetting Google searches.

thezilch 13y ago
I didn't read the original reports, but who started the "dragnet" talks? You? The premise is still true; this woman and her family were questioned due to the keywords they were searching. Someone did piece together her family's searches, and that got them a knock on their door by an SUV team, and the FBI was involved.
- tptacek 13y ago
  The "original report", the Catalano blog post on Medium, overtly said that the US Government was monitoring her family's Google searches, and she followed that up on Twitter with a direct accusation that the FBI was behind it, followed by a "correction" that it was "the JTTF". That original report has now been debunked. But it won't be retracted. Print a retraction and the NSA wins.
  - thezilch 13y ago
    Link to that diff? Her medium blog reads... Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. Someone whose job it is to piece together the things people do on the internet raised the red flag when they saw our search history. Nothing overt about USG watching Google's query IO. I don't think it's a stretch to confuse the FBI with the JTTF, nor that it's a huge leap between the efforts taken against her family and "someone [...] [piecing] together things people do on the internet." Everything she said happened, you just interpreted it incorrectly and started us down the wrong conversation. Frankly, I think it's pretty telling that we're so on edge about how we are interpreting these findings.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      > Frankly, I think it's pretty telling that we're so on edge about how we are interpreting these findings. Well, you might be. I just got bored of seeing the headline, which I dismissed as implausible immediately and didn't bother clicking on the linkbait. So I haven't been able to join in the circus act here on HN.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

md224 13y ago

From the Medium blog post: > 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. From the Suffolk County PD: > 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.” Still not sure who was searching for what, but it looks like the author's search for "pressure cookers" was a red herring... the actual triggering search was for "pressure cooker bombs." I'm guessing it was probably the author or her husband (whoever "the subject" was) just searching for information after the Boston Marathon bombings. The author should've mentioned that she or her husband searched for "pressure cooker bombs," but I'm willing to assume she either didn't know or forgot that such a search took place.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
Just FYI: Typing "pressure cooker " into google search autocompletes to "pressure cooker bomb"
- droithomme 13y ago
  Great find! You are correct, it ranks even higher than "pressure cooker recipes" in the Google autocomplete. Does Google autocomplete usually indicate something is a common search term? Undoubtedly "pressure cooker recipes" is a common search term used by people who have received a pressure cooker as a gift. But "pressure cooker bomb" seems to be a more common search, is that a reasonable conclusion from the Google autocomplete behavior? https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/106230?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/106230?hl=en Google says "The search queries that you see as part of autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all web users and the content of web pages indexed by Google." So two things. Perhaps there are many more pages dealing with bombs than recipes though. Let's find out. "pressure cooker recipes" reports "About 6,360,000 results". "pressure cooker bomb" reports "About 1,720,000 results". Thus Google believes there are six times as many pages dealing with pressure cooker recipes as there are pages dealing with pressure cooker bombs. Therefore, given that they state that both content and search activity are used to form the autocomplete ranking, searching for "pressure cooker bomb" is a fairly common and unremarkable activity. This is not surprising given that it has been in the news a lot this last year. Should then searching for common things that many people search for and which are relevant to recent news be considered evidence that one is engaging in terrorist activity and should be investigated and their house search? I would say, no, that is not reasonable.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

tptacek 13y ago
Yes, this is definitely psy-ops. Don't drink the water, either; it has fluoride in it.

guelo 13y ago

What kind of company has a web search triggered alert that trawls for terrorism related keywords and secretly reports you to the police? They should have said who the employer was so people can avoid working there.

freehunter 13y ago
Honestly, I work in information security and for a long time I was the sole information security analyst (the person who watches the logs and correlation events from the security intelligence monitor) for a 14k employee company. Even if I cared what people were searching for, to monitor Google searches on employee computers would have taken a fair bit of resources that there's not a great business need for unless you actually are interested in what your employees search for. I'm talking having the capabilities to man-in-the-middle an SSL certificate as it passes your proxy server. It's not impossible, it's not even difficult, but it does have a CPU impact on the server that's great enough that you'd think twice about enabling that feature unless you had a specific purpose to build your servers to enable that feature. That alone makes me curious. I was more concerned with watching logins to the PCI environment and checking firewall and anti-virus logs. I didn't have time to care what the users were searching for. I'd like to know what company this is only because apparently they're so overflowing with cash that they can hire staff to monitor Google searches and report them to the FBI. I really need to put "has no moral compass" on my resume...
- lotharbot 13y ago
  There's a much simpler narrative than "company devotes substantial resources to monitor all google searches": The person was apparently a very recent former employee. It's pretty standard procedure to log out a recently departed employee's accounts and revoke all of their permissions, and it's not a big stretch to assume some sort of simple audit of their recent activity. Did they have any partially-completed work sitting on their desktop? Were they still logged in to the billing system? Did they have anything checked out? I can imagine an IT guy at a smallish company sitting down at the console and finding a browser window still open with a handful of work tabs, and a tab of google search results, and noticing the google search results are a little bit suspicious.

robryan 13y ago

Why was the employer going through a former employees browsing history?

lotharbot 13y ago
It's fairly common, particularly with a just-terminated employee or one who left on bad terms, to review any activity they undertook between "we're letting you go" and the last time they actually left the building. Because occasionally, just-terminated employees try to get revenge. I'm not saying this is definitely the case here. Just noting a circumstance under which "checked everything the employee did recently" makes a lot of sense -- and a circumstance under which "searched for pressure cooker bomb information" might appear suspicious, and might lead someone to contact law enforcement.

minimax 13y ago

If you see something suspicious taking place then report that behavior or activity to local law enforcement or in the case of emergency call 9-1-1. http://www.dhs.gov/if-you-see-something-say-something http://www.dhs.gov/if-you-see-something-say-something These types of reports always increase after incidents like the Boston bombings.

autodidakto 13y ago
About a year after 9/11, I was taking pictures of a protestant church in suburban New York as part of a loan assessment. The cops showed up and told us someone had reported us as suspicious. He mentioned something about a mosque being nearby but I didn't know if that meant we were supposedly from the mosque or going after the mosque next. On the same trip, but later in Philadelphia, I was hassled by a rent-a-cop outside of a random building for carrying a camera. If the goal of terrorism is to terrorize the public with irrational fears (leading to wild accusations against each other, and demanding that their government "do something, anything"), 9/11 was a success.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Bob Dylan can't even take a walk before a concert: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-207_162-5243217.html http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-207_162-5243217.html

ignostic 13y ago

This is what happens when you have bloggers writing exclusive news rather than journalists who know how to verify facts. Don't get me wrong: blogging has generally been a good thing for the spread of information and exchange of ideas. If bloggers want to start running down leads and researching exclusives, though, they'd best learn to fact check.

icebraining 13y ago
This wasn't a blogger writing an exclusive news, this was someone writing a story that (allegedly) happened to herself.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

quantumpotato_ 13y ago

It's not on http://apps.suffolkcountyny.gov/police/morepress.htm http://apps.suffolkcountyny.gov/police/morepress.htm (yet?)

MrKurtz 13y ago

The most disturbing and disappointing part of the whole story is how it spread without even the slightest attempt to do any journalism work, and now that the truth was uncovered hardly anyone is publishing or updating originals with corrections and retractions: http://www.techmeme.com/130801/p52#a130801p52 http://www.techmeme.com/130801/p52#a130801p52 It's fucking shameful.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
dreamfactory 13y ago
Is this report any more verified?
- ewoodrich 13y ago
  There is a direct statement from the local police department. http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/screen-shot-2013-08-01-at-3-46-53-pm.png?w=640 http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/screen-s...
- MrKurtz 13y ago
  http://www.bnowire.com/inbox/?id=1953 http://www.bnowire.com/inbox/?id=1953

detcader 13y ago

Where is the press release exactly? It doesn't seem to be on Suffolk County's website [1], which is what TechCrunch links to. EDIT: the author said in the comments section that the SCPD emailed them the release. [1] http://apps.suffolkcountyny.gov/police/morepress.htm http://apps.suffolkcountyny.gov/police/morepress.htm

octotoad 13y ago

Do we really have to append 'gate' to every potentially controversial news event? Looks and sounds even more ridiculous than usual in this case.

rlwolfcastle 13y ago

People were getting ahead of themselves in this story. It never made any sense that if this was occurring one hundred times a day that it would not have been mentioned somewhere else before now given the current focus on privacy and the NSA.

vitaltao 13y ago

Glad to see thoughtcrimes are being properly investigated, in any case.