We Can All Resume Googling Backpacks And Pressure Cookers

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/an-update-on-the-pressure-cookers-google-search-story/

by luigi • 13 years ago

24 45 13 years ago

Who are you to tell me it's okay to compromise my privacy?

grimtrigger5• 13 years ago

The home owner voluntarily agreed to a search. Not sure what the privacy violation was... unless you think internet searches on your employer's network falls within your domain of privacy?

gohrt3• 13 years ago

It it legally impossible to consent under duress. (for example, this is why rape is still illegal, even if she says "yes" after the perpetrator pistol-whips her.) No contract would be upheld if the court found out that one of the parties was weilding a gun during the negotiation.

The police have no right to "ask" you for permission to search your home, as there is an implied threat of deadly force. (Cf everybody who gets shot for flinching while in view of a cop.)

Sadly, the old white rich person judges pretend that this doesn't happen, and allow this unconstitutional activity to continue.

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

What you do on your employer's computer on your employer's network isn't private. Maybe it should be, but we all know that it isn't. We may even have signed a form to that effect.

lettergram• 13 years ago

Well it wasn't a PRISM program or anything, simply a company monitoring internal internet usage. This I understand and makes sense, although I don't think it warranted a call to police...

My company does the same thing, turns out one of the managers had been downloading porn onto their computer for months and the first time we installed it we noticed. When we checked out his computer he had over 200 Gb of the stuff... so yeah, he was fired, clearly he wasn't doing his job to the best of his performance.

grimtrigger5• 13 years ago

Here's the HN thread when the story was first posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140545. Its fun/important to go back and do a little autopsy about the way things played out.

JPKab• 13 years ago

Cue the massive avalanche of 'I told you so' from all of the smart people on HN who were arguing that there was no way this was NSA related yesterday.

mpyne5• 13 years ago

This cueing could get real meta, real fast. :)

Point taken though.

mcphilip• 13 years ago

We already played this game yesterday evening:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6144294

mladenkovacevic3• 13 years ago

Nobody was (or at least I wasn't) claiming 100% that this was the result of NSA spying. My big frustration was that in a matter of half an hour, 2 very viral denouncement posts appeared from honest-to-god journalists, basically belittling this woman's claims implying that she is an idiot, an attention whore or a hoaxer, without any additional facts or insights.

If anything it is a stark foreshadowing of how we will be shamed and mocked into the status quo not by our government but by our peers, eased into it like an old man gently lowering his body into an uncomfortably warm bath.

phpnode• 13 years ago

I'm confused by your point. Are you suggesting that we should assume everything we read is true until we have 'more facts' or 'additional insight'?

The reason her story was denounced by a few people is because those people had not let their ability to think critically be clouded by the current NSA/Snowden frenzy.

gohrt3• 13 years ago

If we don't mock the hoaxers, we run the risk of genuine stories getting politely ignored along with the hoaxes.

Remember the story of the Child Who Cried Wolf.

mpyne5• 13 years ago

I read this on my phone last night and was convinced it would have already been submitted to HN by the time I got to work. Sad to say I was wrong, but I'm glad someone mentioned it.

Here we have another win for tptacek in the "common sense and reason" column.

cobrausn4• 13 years ago

Not completely. He was quick to link alternate explanations that made equally little sense but didn't make it the result of NSA data mining - such as a picture of fireworks posted on facebook causing it all, despite the fact they showed up asking about pressure cookers. He was fighting a wave of people who were 100% certain it was the NSA, but still...

'Common Sense and Reason' belongs only to those who read the story and waited to hear more before posting. But I'm biased. :-D

mpyne5• 13 years ago

Well that's the point, there were many alternative explanations of at least as much sense (however little sense they actually made) but people fixated on the one alternative explanation that conformed to their worldview.

I also didn't comment on the thread as I didn't know what exactly was going on. But I was very sure that it would be something along the lines of what tptacek himself predicted so why say anything anyways? I just upvoted and moved on.

tptacek3• 13 years ago

Huh? I linked to Declan McCullagh's alternate (and more plausible) possibility. Nobody, including McCullagh, claimed to know for sure that that alternative was what happened. It's telling that you'd continue to make that argument --- noting that I was "quick to link to it" --- despite repeated clarifications from both me and McCullagh about the point of the link.

ollysb3• 13 years ago

There can't be many people that have at least searched for the anarchists cookbook at some time. The notion that the authorities now think it's ok to turn up at my doorstep for that is incredible. The language used is pretty chilling as well, apparently just searching for "bomb" is now an "incident". I'm also aware that I now have a little voice questioning whether or not I should post this comment...

grimtrigger5• 13 years ago

Did you even read the article? The whole point is that isn't what happened.

Edit: Misunderstood the parent's comments. Yes, this is what happened.

ollysb3• 13 years ago

After interviewing the company representatives, Suffolk County Police Detectives visited the subject’s home to ask about the suspicious internet searches.

So they went to someone's house because of "suspicious internet searches". The fact that the search wasn't detected using an automated system doesn't diminish my point that they think it's ok to turn up on your doorstep if they don't like the searches you're making.

grimtrigger5• 13 years ago

The notion that the authorities now think it's ok to turn up at my doorstep for that is incredible.

But this has always been true. If your neighbor gets robbed, you're going to get a knock on your door to see if you saw anything. They could stop by and ask for a glass of lemonade. Who cares? You seem to imply that there was some intimidation, but I read nothing to indicate that.

jrkelly• 13 years ago

The bigger point is that the general public is starting to get worked up about this stuff - I could see lots of people retelling the "can you believe you can't google pressure cookers anymore?" story. Even though the NSA isn't related here people are starting to assume the worst. Hopefully this will start to make the general public more upset which is only way to ultimately change anything.

gohrt3• 13 years ago

The general public will realize that these complaints are unfounded, because the most famous ones all turn our to be false, and starts trusting the government over the privact advocates. And maybe the general public is right... HN has gone from skeptic to full nutter over the NSA recently, accusing the NSA of doing excessively expensive and complicated secret projects for no benefit, not even their own benefit, and of ignoring cheap, easier, well-dcoumented, more obvious techniques to achieve the same results.

thesis• 13 years ago

Ok, so, what IS the point of PRISM (or any other service monitoring Google or whatever company) then?

Do you have to search something like "I want to _____ (insert terrorist action) on _______ (insert date) at ______ (location)" in order to actually trigger something?

mpyne5• 13 years ago

The point of PRISM is that if you already have a person of interest in mind, you can data mine within that persons's communications, likes, pages read, etc. to determine if he/she is actually being 'radicalized', or if they have connections to other people who are 'radicalized'.

From there you can determine "who's who in the zoo" of extremist cells for use in other intelligence collection schemes. E.g. if someone receives messages from known intermediaries of an AQ bomb makers and then 'drops off the grid' it may be a good time to step up to video/satellite surveillance.

Simply doing random searches isn't tracked by PRISM (though it might be from systems that use wiretap features). But even random searches like those are likely to simply be filtered out outright by the NSA, they are simply too common (even without pranksters who run the search thinking they're Sticking It to The Man) to be worth following up individually.

Even the NSA doesn't have infinite resources after all, and they are still dependent on other agencies for follow-up activities, and those other agencies are certainly more resource-constrained than NSA is.

joering23• 13 years ago

I hate to be this guy, but knowing this [1] and this [2] and this [3], I think that news release from Suffolk Police is not sufficient enough. I mean there are bigger scandals full of lies coming from official officials, how can I be assured local Suffolk Police tells the truth?

[1] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130611/11122823408/senato...

[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/obama-syria-cong...

[3] http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/07/02/national-inte...

grimtrigger5• 13 years ago

When authorities make small claims that make common sense, they require less discretion.

Common sense indicates that this was not part of a dragnet of people searching pressure cookers and backpacks. If it was: where are the reports of the certainly dozens (hundreds/thousands?) of people who have made similar searches?

We Can All Resume Googling Backpacks And Pressure Cookers

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