Employer Tipped Off Police In Pressure Cooker/Backpack-gate, Not Google
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
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.
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).
FWIW, she cross-posted to here http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/01-8 , and I don't see any significant changes.
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?
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.
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".
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:
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.
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.
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.
To say this is a hoax is to say these things did not happen. What is your evidence of this?
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.
HN is "tame" to say the least.
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.
"Government coverup to protect Google"
People will believe what they want to believe.
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.
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."
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?
That being said, you're coming across like an asshole gloating about taking the unpopular stand and being right.
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.
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.
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 am not "bringing in stupid reddit comparisons," but wow, you are the most offensive person on this thread.
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.
You speak as if rational discourse is useless to your objective (as noble as it may be).
Publishing it in the first place may well be.
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.
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.
> CLARIFICATION AND UPDATE
> 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.
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.
Pretty sure I was the opposite of wrong.
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!
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 former employee's searches took place on this employee's workplace computer."
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 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.
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
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.
Furthermore, Google autocomplete is entirely game-able. /b and or Anonymous have had their way with it on several occasions.
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.
Perhaps you've heard of it?
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.
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.
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...
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.
http://www.dhs.gov/if-you-see-something-say-something
These types of reports always increase after incidents like the Boston bombings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Looks and sounds even more ridiculous than usual in this case.
It's fucking shameful.
http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/screen-s...