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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

There is another huge step missing here - proof of causation. How do they know it was their web searches that caused the visit?

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They don't. See: https://plus.google.com/112961607570158342254/posts/FWAVRVaN...

So you're saying that a woman posted photos of firecrackers on Facebook on July 4th, and this may have contributed to a visit by the police? And this is supposed to be BETTER?

I agree that we need more information before jumping to conclusions, but the additional context you're providing doesn't give me much comfort.

I'm not trying to comfort you or defend the local cops who showed up. Arguably showing up over a FB post is even dumber than if they actually had snarfed Internet searches.

But local cops acting dumb is a different story entirely than LOCAL COPS WATCHING OUR GOOGLE SEARCHES.

Alright, that's a fair point. I still think it's a bit scary/sad that we need to worry about our public Facebook posts being potentially misconstrued by local police as grounds for a visit.

Far better in my book. It means what likely happened is any one of her FB friends, or since the firecrackers were public, anyone else saw the image of fireworks and possibly other comments, became concerned, and reported it to law enforcement. Even if this was found via some source of open source intelligence gathering operation that ended up in a visit, that is leagues away from private google searches leading to a visit.

> So you're saying that a woman posted photos of firecrackers

M-66 explosives that look like firecrackers.

I'm glad you found this.

I don't doubt that some law enforcement officers from some agency showed up at her doorstep for some reason. And I can accept that there were - at some point - questions about bombs for some reason or another.

But I suspect that her internet searches contributed to this appearance is (at best) hysteria or (at worst) convenient mistruths.

Assuming that the visit is actually related to Internet monitoring, then the monitoring algorithm is certainly not 'everybody who searches X AND Y AND NOT Z,' but rather some calculated terrorism score. Actually I think it is entirely possible, that whoever does this has no actual idea how the score is calculated and the machine learning algorithm did just pick them because of a random similarity to the search profile.

Ignoring your shameless self promotion, how do you know that the post you reference wasn't "reasonable suspicion" for law enforcement to gain access to the internet searches? Your assumption does not discount or disprove the assumption in the story. How is your conjecture any more accurate? Why not as a reporter for a news outlet, follow up instead of adding to the disinformation?

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