Could Googling 'pressure cookers' and 'backpacks' really get you in trouble with the feds?
A journalist claims she was visited by a terrorism task force after some innocent searching
Michele Catalano, a writer living in Long Island, N.Y., did what many home cooks have done before and searched online for a pressure cooker. Unfortunately, her husband had recently done a Google search for a backpack.
Google searches for those "two things together would have seemed innocuous" in the past, she wrote, "but we are in 'these times' now" — a reference to the Boston Marathon bombings in April. Suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev have been accused of making bombs out of pressure cookers and hiding them in duffel bags, which later killed three people and injured 264 more.
The result of those Google searches, according to Catalano's post on Medium, was this interaction on Wednesday morning between six armed agents of a "joint terrorism task force" and Catalano's husband as the men searched through their house:
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The implication is that Catalano and her husband were caught up in some kind of online monitoring operation by a counterterrorism agency. In light of the classified information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, it seemed like the perfect story to illustrate the dangers of living in a surveillance state.
However, The Guardian later reported that the so-called task force appeared to be made up of officers from the Suffolk County and Nassau County police departments. The FBI also denied that a task force visited her house.
The problem with her story, writes The Christian Science Monitor's Dan Murphy, is that we don't have definitive proof that the authorities were visiting the couple because of their search history.
He notes that she didn't quote the men "saying they'd arrived because of their internet searches specifically." Instead, that's her supposition, he writes:
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"All of this sounds very shady, but it doesn’t exactly scream of an insidious, privacy-invading terrorism investigation," says Caitlin Dewey at The Washington Post. "At least it’s impossible to make that conclusion without more information."
If Catalano's suspicions are correct, however, it would serve as ample ammunition for privacy advocates rallying against PRISM, the NSA's electronic surveillance program.
As Jared Newman notes in TIME, "For all we've heard about PRISM over the last couple of months, what we haven’t seen are clear examples of innocent people — those who say they have nothing to hide — having federal agents enter their homes on the basis of some Google searches."
Catalano said she is convinced that is exactly what happened.
"This is where we are at," she wrote. "Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list."
UPDATE: Well, that explains a few things. The Suffolk County Police Department has released the following statement:
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Keith Wagstaff is a staff writer at TheWeek.com covering politics and current events. He has previously written for such publications as TIME, Details, VICE, and the Village Voice.
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