Google Pressure Cookers and Backpacks, Get a Visit from the Feds

[AdamSmith]

Google Pressure Cookers and Backpacks, Get a Visit from the Feds

Philip Bump 10:09 AM ET

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?

Catalano (who is a professional writer) describes the tension of that visit.

[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. ...

Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb?

My husband, ever the oppositional kind, asked them if they themselves weren’t curious as to how a pressure cooker bomb works, if they ever looked it up. Two of them admitted they did.

The men identified themselves as members of the "joint terrorism task force." The composition of such task forces depend on the region of the country, but, as we outlined after the Boston bombings, include a variety of federal agencies. Among them: the FBI and Homeland Security.

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.

It is also possible that there were other factors that prompted the government's interest in Catalano and her husband. He travels to Asia, she notes in her article. Who knows. Which is largely Catalano's point.

They mentioned that they do this about 100 times a week. And that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing. I don’t know what happens on the other 1% of visits and I’m not sure I want to know what my neighbors are up to.

One hundred times a week, groups of six armed men drive to houses in three black SUVs, conducting consented-if-casual searches of the property perhaps in part because of things people looked up online.

But the NSA doesn't collect data on Americans, so this certainly won't happen to you.

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

[TotallyOz]

On my last trip to Thailand, I brought my pressure cooker. I love cooking with me but the issues with the past few months made me leery. I had to google it to see if the TSA allowed it. They do but it was hard to find.

I did break the cooker up into two parts. One with the lid and one with the pot. I had no problems after that.

http://www.amazon.com/Kuhn-Rikon-Duromatic-Pressure-Stockpot/dp/B001A08VPK/ref=sr_1_7?s=kitchen&ie=UTF8&qid=1375373390&sr=1-7&keywords=pressure+cooker

[Guest hitoallusa]

Oh my OZ, what do you cook with a pressure cooker? Do you braise some meat. I love guys who utilizes special cookers to make food. It shows they have very developed tasted and don't mind putting in some effort to creating a great dish.

On my last trip to Thailand, I brought my pressure cooker. I love cooking with me but the issues with the past few months made me leery. I had to google it to see if the TSA allowed it. They do but it was hard to find.

I did break the cooker up into two parts. One with the lid and one with the pot. I had no problems after that.

http://www.amazon.com/Kuhn-Rikon-Duromatic-Pressure-Stockpot/dp/B001A08VPK/ref=sr_1_7?s=kitchen&ie=UTF8&qid=1375373390&sr=1-7&keywords=pressure+cooker

[AdamSmith]

Do you braise some meat.

I love it when you talk dirty.

[Guest hitoallusa]

"Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? My husband, ever the oppositional kind, asked them if they themselves weren’t curious as to how a pressure cooker bomb works, if they ever looked it up. Two of them admitted they did."

Did the husband look up how to make a pressure cooker or not???? The wife should not write like this. She should state whether her husband actually looked up how to make a pressure cooker or not! I think that is a very pertinent information but she writes ambiguously. Maybe her husband was afraid he might be nagged by his wife so he hided from her that he looked up or she just wanted to make her story interesting so she left the very important fact out. We will never know.

I think it is fair for the government to scrutinize this couple if they indeed looked up how to make a bomb. I don't blame them. And if her husband did then she should write it in her story.

[AdamSmith]

Her own article seems clear 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. And in these times, when things like the Boston bombing happen, you spend a lot of time on the internet reading about it and, if you are my exceedingly curious news junkie of a twenty-year-old son, you click a lot of links when you read the myriad of stories. You might just read a CNN piece about how bomb making instructions are readily available on the internet and you will in all probability, if you are that kid, click the link provided.

Which might not raise any red flags. Because who wasn’t reading those stories? Who wasn’t clicking those links? 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...

https://medium.com/something-like-falling/2e7d13e54724

[Guest hitoallusa]

Not sure whether CNN irresponsibly provides links for bomb making instructions. Did they actually do that? I think I read in the past most of those links have an alarm trigger and get you automatically reported to the authorities. I'm leaning on the side that the family somehow did something that alerted the authorities. Anyways, 100 times a week? That's about 14-15 times a day.

[Guest hitoallusa]

So who searched her house since both the FBI and the local police department deny involvement. Only person who actually experienced the search was her husband and did her husband made up the story? If this indeed happened then at least he should have written down their badge numbers before allowing them inside his house. Who would allow one's house to be searched without a warrant?

[Guest Hoover42]

More info. According to this latest update, neither the NSA nor Google were responsible:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/01/employer-tipped-off-police-in-pressure-cookerbackpack-gate-not-google/

[AdamSmith]

Thanks for that. Good to see the real story.

[Guest hitoallusa]

Thanks.. So the mystery is solved.. I bet her husband has to explain himself to his wife... I noticed something was wrong when he retorted the question.