Ever since Snowden (though also before) Hacker News has become increasingly irrational whenever it comes to anything involving "The Government", and I'm long past sick of it. Your post pointed out the logical impossibility of the original account being true, and everyone shot you down because they wanted it to be true.
Yes, there are very, extremely legitimate reasons to be concerned. But that doesn't mean we should abandon all logic and assume every story is true because it fits a narrative.
> We found out through the Suffolk Police Department that the searches involved also things my husband looked up at his old job. We were not made aware of this at the time of questioning and were led to believe it was solely from searches from within our house.
The reason she thought "the Government" was monitoring her searches was because "the Government" told them they were looking at their searches. They clearly did not communicate that well, but I don't see how that's terribly irrational.
Note that her wording was chosen to avoid refuting her original claim, which was that the government was monitoring her searches (read carefully, noting that she discussed searches made by every member of her family).
HN's increasing inability to apply critical thinking is frustrating. I think it's due to a combination of groupthink, a tendency to be manipulated by their fears, and a willingness to believe what they want to believe.
I got fooled because I trust the Atlantic Monthly, which has been around for some 150 years, but apparently The Atlantic Wire is something altogether different. This is the second story they've blown recently.
Every time I see a comment "hurr durr hackernews is becoming more reddit every day we reddit the reddit" I see another geniunely pointless noise point injected into the discourse.
Everyone that does this is actually making things worse than they would've been otherwise, is actually creating the bullshit situation they're decrying.
Please, everyone, stop bringing in the stupid reddit comparisons.
I was just highlighting that the reasons presented are the same issues reddit has in common. To ignore the problems is ignorant. But I can see you are pretty bent out of shape about two communities sharing any similarities and the interesting patterns that emerge. Lest we be intelligent about the entire thing, let's just argue about arguing.
I am not "bringing in stupid reddit comparisons," but wow, you are the most offensive person on this thread.
I voted it up not because I believed it, but because I don't give a shit if others disbelieve it.
Anything that can further the growing mass of anger and resentment at the US military's illegal surveillance actions and resultant policy of dishonesty is beneficial to our ends.
I think apathy overrides most of the benefits derived from rational discourse on the broader scale. In a limited forum such as HN, it's great.
When pushing the "the government is violating your rights and must be stopped" on a larger scale, factual precision becomes much less important.
The immediate goal is to generate as much general awareness and outrage as possible. Everything from the metadata vs content debate to service provider denials of data-sharing to Snowden's hot ex-girlfriend are distractions from that objective.
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.
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.
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.
She didn't confuse FBI with JTTF, she confused local Police Detectives with JTTF (which includes the FBI).
This is the part where she suggests the government is watching her entire family (herself, her husband and her son):
"search for a backpack set off an alarm of sorts at the joint terrorism task force headquarters."
and
"I imagine [...] Lots of bells and whistles and a crowd of task force workers huddled around a computer screen looking at our Google history."
"The Government" isn't spying on her to make sure she isn't a terrorist, the software an employer has to monitor the disclosure of trade secrets and disgruntled employees flagged risky behavior. The employer then contacted local police, who visited and did an amazingly lack-luster investigation of the situation (as she states in her story).
> 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.
Well, the author was at work? Her husband was at home?
Ergo, the author didn't have all of the information available when the article was written.
Shall I post a retraction with an equally misinformed slant, or can we agree that the wholesale collection of a great percentage of the electronic communications on Earth is an egregious breach of the public trust?
Note that she has now posted a "retraction" which, impressively, manages not to retract the money claim of her whole story (which is that the government was monitoring her family's Internet searches); no, instead, she's corrected it to (paraphrase) "unbeknownst to us, the government wasn't solely relying on my family's Internet searches".
Yet, in light of the current situation, considering the hyperbole surrounding this issue, I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, whereas I am much less willing to grant the same amount of forgiveness to the US government.
The track record is not in the government's favor, unless you support the many questionably unconstitutional programs perpetuated by the US government, from seemingly innocuous "hoovering" of electronic communications the world over, to extra-judicial executions of Americans suspected of "terrorism," to endless proxy wars which only serve to enrich a few "vendors" while simultaneously depleting our national resources.
I refuse to adhere to the Bushism "yer either with us, or yer against us..."
It is not so cut & dried. Not so black & white.
It is possible to be anti terrorist while also being anti conflict proliferation.
> I refuse to adhere to the Bushism "yer either with us, or yer against us..."
Funny, if anyone expresses skepticism about that anti-government narrative then they are labeled as NSA shills - exactly as in "you are either with us or against us".
But let's be clear here. It's from a search that was performed on an employer owned computer from a recently released employee. This is an entirely different narrative than the one insinuated in the original blog post. I'd say the premise was fundamentally flawed to begin with seeing as how she presented zero evidence and only anecdotes from her husband.
Well, it seems many people are convinced this is just a clever cover up. To some, it must make more sense that the NSA, with limitless access to personal data, can't tell whether someone is actually plotting a terrorist attack or not, so they send the local PD with no search or arrest warrants to have a friendly 45 minute chat.
It seems the NSA is our new Area 51 and "JTTF" are the Men In Black. People want to believe. Much like alien UFOs were to secret spy planes, these fantastical claims coming out now are likely to the actual secret spy technologies. Great cover and distraction from what is actually being done.
I think this is truer than people here will give you credit for; a huge chunk of the most vocal participants of these threads are outrage tourists; they're --- not being hyperbolic --- disappointed to find out that the whole USG isn't behind these events; it makes the narrative boring.
And I think you're right about the second point. The hyperbolic conclusions people jump to about these stories are, effectively, ambit claims for the surveillance state.
But how shocked are you that it turned out also not to be pictures of fireworks (seeing as you posted the article that speculated facebook photos were to blame)?
Not at all shocked. I liked Declan's post because it posited a more plausible scenario than the article's "FBI is monitoring my Googles". Declan posted it for the same reason. You apparently don't follow him on Twitter and expect his Google+ feed to give you full insight into his thoughts. Oops.
I anticipate any number of people will try to jump on the fact that the FBI didn't literally respond to a Facebook photo and have decided to simply quietly and not-so-quietly make fun of those people.
Here's my original post, which I stand by 1000% now, which is easy to do since it's been entirely vindicated:
To be clear, I stood by that post as well (and was really surprised at all the flack you were getting for making a wildly rational argument). I just thought Declan's post only added even more valueless speculation to the conversation.
If that's the takeaway you got from it, you probably needed the Twitter context to make sense of the point he was making. I suspect that's why he wrote it on G+ and not on CNet.
Or, maybe it was because his corporate overlords at CBS, where he is a political correspondent (spit!) would have had him skinned if he wrote it on their masthead.
Yeah, if there was more context needed I certainly didn't have it. Specifically it was the fact that he said pretty clearly that authorities visiting after viewing a facebook photo of fireworks was "the most likely conclusion", which irked me.
I thought that statement was irresponsible for a reporter to make in the face of so few verified facts about the incident or circumstances that preceded it.
Sorry, my second sentence made it sound like my response was intended to be snarky, but I in fact understand where you're coming from and don't expect you to have the full context for random G+ stories.
Again: when someone writes something on their G+ page, it's hard to accuse them of not meeting journalistic standards; it's a G+ page. If McCullagh wanted that post to be on CNet, it would have been on CNet.
Oookay, now I see what you meant. I guess I get that point but don't find it reasonable in today's age of the collision of journalism and social media. A G+ page that identifies you as a professional journalist is likely to be treated and interpreted by readers as a source of journalism. I suspect if Declan was an enterprise Java developer the post wouldn't have been paid much attention, or up-voted. Apologies for dragging this out though, I think my confusion caused us both to belabor our points :)
Hm. I tried to be careful when I used the word "hoax"; for instance, I described it elsewhere as an "inadvertent hoax". But I'll go farther here: I think the story was dishonest and deliberately sensationalized. Yeah, I'll call it a hoax. Sure.
How do you figure? Did the JTTF interrogate her husband and search their house? Did they ask about pressure cookers? Are they now saying it was because of a web search that they initiated the interrogation and search? Yes or no?
To say this is a hoax is to say these things did not happen. What is your evidence of this?
No, "the JTTF" didn't interrogate her husband. The Suffolk PD did, because the employer called them. It's hard to respond to the other questions because they're premised on the first.
Is your assertion that she is lying when she says they identified themselves as part of the JTTF which is overseen by the FBI and includes local police force members throughout the US whose salary and expenses they pay while working on JTTF tasks? Or are you saying that they lied to her in saying they were JTTF.
You are very clearly stating here "'the JTTF' didn't interrogate her husband", meaning that she is lying when she says they told her that or they told her that and were lying. Please cite your evidence of this claim.
Yes. I'm saying she's being dishonest about what happened. Also, you continue to use the term "the JTTF", which is misleading. The FBI has formally denied being involved in the interview, and the Suffolk PD just announced that they were behind it. It's the blog author (and you) who invoked (and now continue to invoke) the FBI, and to invoke "the JTTF".
"The JTTF" didn't interrogate anyone. Detectives from the Suffolk County PD, who may also be members of a JTTF and identified themselves as such, received a tip and followed up on it. What's misleading is trying to say the investigation was JTTF-lead, VS a local pd investigation who's outcome may be shared with the JTTF.
I don't see any disconnect.
Corporate partnerships with government used to have a negative connotation.
Much the same as the way that governmental employment of mercenaries was once frowned upon, as well as conflicts of interest, which seem to have gained favor in the past 15 years or so.
This sounds to me like it's more a case of sour grapes on the part of the former employer than any sort of redemption for a government's overstepping its mandate.
For those of you playing the home bingo version of this thread, someone calling in a stupid, paranoid, wrong tip to their local police department has now been reframed as a "corporate partnership with the government".
When an employer "blows the whistle" on a former employee whose employment was recently terminated, the onus lies with the government to do their due diligence before encroaching upon the sanctity of the former employees home.
Thus, my reference to a partnership with the government maintains some semblance of appropriateness.
This story directly ties into the Orwellian "See Something, Say Something" campaign initiated by the US government in the name of "the war on <some> terror."
I don't see how Google holds any culpability in this situation.
Google isn't the source of the abrogations of our civil rights, Google is merely the avenue by which the surveillance apparatus gains a toehold on a vast amount of data, be it meta, or otherwise.
governmental employment of mercenaries was once frowned upon
When, exactly? What do you think that stuff about 'letters of Marque and Reprisal' in the Constitution refers to, if not Congress's ability to subcontract these things to the private sector?
I was with you on the original medium HN comment thread [1] and suggested that the police possibly did pay a visit but not directly related to google searches.
That being said, you're coming across like an asshole gloating about taking the unpopular stand and being right.
I think the gloating is deserved, particularly as a message for the HN community as it currently evolving. There was a fairly large pile-on of people vehemently disagreeing with tptacek despite him presenting an entirely reasonable argument that turned out to be close to the truth. Declaring victory on this one may help the community to remember to not just blindly believe anything written on the internet due to the fact it conforms with their strongly held concerns and beliefs.
I hope my comment is taken in the spirit in which it is intended, which is one of gleeful mockery and not gloating; unfortunately, the dumber HN acts, the dumber I end up looking for being here.
But you and Declan were still wrong. His claims didn't make sense; it was the opposite of Occam's Razor. Indeed their Google searches were monitored, it just wasn't by the NSA/FBI.
Well, we don't know that for sure - they could have tipped off the employer, but that's too much speculation to be productive conversation.
So the original account was true, and it posed the question (or, demanded an explanation), how did the police know? Now we have our answer.
Edit: Wait, you're saying Declan's post was a joke? I didn't follow this one or the threads that closely after the initial read, so maybe I missed something. His reply to my earlier comment gave me the impression that was not a joke.
Declan's point wasn't that he knew the firecracker picture to be the cause of the visit, but only that there was at least one narrative more plausible than the blog post's original narrative of "they're dragnetting Google for pressure cooker searches". That's all.
The thing is, the fireworks theory was absolutely not more plausible. It didn't even make a little bit of sense. It was clear that someone had acted on the Google searches, not facebook pictures of fireworks on July 4th. Unsurprisingly, this was confirmed to be the case.
I don't see anywhere that he asserted that Declan's theory about the Facebook post was correct. In fact, I see the opposite[1], demonstrating exactly the kind of questioning everyone should have been doing today.
I also find it more than a little disingenuous that you included the "Well, we don't know that for sure - they could have tipped off the employer" line in there. Especially after attempting to invoke Occam's Razor. Yes, the NSA could have tipped off the employer to review an employee's searches and hope that they would then report it to the police. Of course, the police could have also seen the fireworks on Facebook, reported it to the NSA, who then planted the searches on the computer for the employer to find. We don't know for sure, after all!
If you found that part disingenuous, you misinterpreted my post. I included that only to immediately dismiss it, in the same vein as your intentionally asinine example. My point was that the fireworks being the cause of the visit makes far less sense than the Google searches being monitored. Which turned out to be correct - they were monitored.
I read ESR's new post on race relations prophylactically before reading this thread; my face is already covered in a protective layer of leaked cerebrospinal fluid from the resulting ruptures.
So long as we don't know what our government is doing, so long as it gets away with lying to us (e.g. Clapper to congress) it's better to be more suspicious than less. So I really wonder why it is that you are gloating.
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.
"""
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.”
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.
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.
The only thing implausible here is that the FBI or other Federales would reveal intelligence sources and methods so carelessly.
The fact remains that the gov't maintains systems that monitor and log online activity with automatic flagging/storage based on keywords. I do find it unlikely that peon-agents and JTTF types have routine access to that data, but I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that some info regarding a potential threat might have been passed down to peon-agents with a suggestion or task for them to follow up on.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
No, they shouldn't. It's hard to imagine anyone reading your comments or my comments who believes that the police should have been called over these Google searches.
I've conducted all manner of searches on a vast array of questionable subjects. (former military here) I've searched on ricin extraction, homemade thermite, homemade napalm, and more, and I have yet to receive a knock on my door from the authorities. (knock on wood)
This case appears to be a vindictive act by a former employer, rather than a direct result of NSA data interception.
9:15 am - employee arrives at work, late again. Employer decides this is the last straw.
10 am - employer meets with employee, tells them their services are no longer needed and to clean out their desk
11 am - employee has packed all personal supplies, but still a little shocked and not quite ready to get up and leave.
11:01 am - employee notices computer is still logged in. Searches "pressure cooker bomb" either accidentally when trying to find "pressure cooker reviews", or intentionally as a result of news story.
11:02 am - IT guy uses remote program, preparing to log employee out and remove credentials. Notices the "pressure cooker bomb" search results, and passes them on to the boss who passes them on to police.
It's certainly possible the employer was being vindictive; it's also possible that the ex-employee entertained the thought of bombing the office. But we have no real reason to conclude either party was actually malicious, only that they were possibly malicious.
I'll not enter into a hypothetical conversation at this point without evidence to support your suppositions, as it's far too easy to flip your speculations around and spin it into a position which supports my own views while failing to actually address the heart of the matter at hand.
> "Conjecture....I'll not enter into a hypothetical conversation"
Too late! Remember writing this?
> "This case appears to be a vindictive act by a former employer"
I was simply responding to _your_ conjecture with an alternative set of conjecture. My point, which you failed to address, was that neither set of conjecture has been shown to be actual, only possible.
What we actually know is that somebody in the family searched for "pressure cooker bomb" from their former employer's computer, and that the former employer contacted police. We don't know if there was malice on anyone's part. We have no particular reason to suspect involvement by the NSA, the FBI, the KGB, 4chan/b/, or any other group beyond the family, the former employer, and two reasonably local law enforcement agencies.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
