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Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which prompts the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?

Catalano (who is a professional writer) describes the tension of that visit.

[T]hey were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked. ...

Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? My husband, ever the oppositional kind, asked them if they themselves weren’t curious as to how a pressure cooker bomb works, if they ever looked it up. Two of them admitted they did.
The men identified themselves as members of the "joint terrorism task force." The composition of such task forces depend on the region of the country, but, as we outlined after the Boston bombings, include a variety of federal agencies. (The photo above is from the door-to-door sweep in Watertown at that time.) Among those agencies: the FBI and Homeland Security.

Update 1:45 p.m.: In a conversation with The Atlantic Wire, FBI spokesperson Peter Donald confirmed The Guardian's report that the FBI was not involved in the visit itself. Asked if the FBI was involved in providing information that led to the visit, Donald replied that he could not answer the question at this point, as he didn't know.

We asked if the Suffolk and Nassau police, which The Guardian reported were the authorities that effected the visit, are part of the government's regional Joint Terrorism Task Force. They are, he replied, representing two of the 52 agencies that participate. He said that local police are often deputized federal marshals for that purpose — but that the JTTF "did not visit the residence." He later clarified: "Any officers, agents, or other representatives of the JTTF did not visit that location."

We are awaiting a response from Suffolk County police and the Department of Homeland Security which operates an investigatory fusion center in the region. A representative of the Nassau County police denied the department's involvement in the visit.

Ever since details of the NSA's surveillance infrastructure were leaked by Edward Snowden, the agency has been insistent on the boundaries of the information it collects. It is not, by law, allowed to spy on Americans — although there are exceptions of which it takes advantage. Its PRISM program, under which it collects internet content, does not include information from Americans unless those Americans are connected to terror suspects by no more than two other people. It collects metadata on phone calls made by Americans, but reportedly stopped collecting metadata on Americans' internet use in 2011. So how, then, would the government know what Catalano and her husband were searching for?

It's possible that one of the two of them is tangentially linked to a foreign terror suspect, allowing the government to review their internet activity. After all, that "no more than two other people" ends up covering millions of people. Or perhaps the NSA, as part of its routine collection of as much internet traffic as it can, automatically flags things like Google searches for "pressure cooker" and "backpack" and passes on anything it finds to the FBI.

Or maybe it was something else. On Wednesday, The Guardian reported on XKeyscore, a program eerily similar to Facebook search that could clearly allow an analyst to run a search that picked out people who'd done searches for those items from the same location. How those searches got into the government's database is a question worth asking; how the information got back out seems apparent.

It is also possible that there were other factors that prompted the government's interest in Catalano and her husband. He travels to Asia, she notes in her article. Who knows. Which is largely Catalano's point.

They mentioned that they do this about 100 times a week. And that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing. I don’t know what happens on the other 1% of visits and I’m not sure I want to know what my neighbors are up to.
One hundred times a week, groups of six armed men drive to houses in three black SUVs, conducting consented-if-casual searches of the property perhaps in part because of things people looked up online.

But the NSA doesn't collect data on Americans, so this certainly won't happen to you.

gawker.com wrote:It is every internet browser's worst nightmare: Google searches and browser history lead the feds to their door. One Long Island woman set of an internet panic attack when she claimed she was visited by anti-terrorism authorities after she searched Google for cookers. But local police have a different, much less sexy explanation.

Michele Catalano is a Long Island-based journalist who has written for Boing Boing, Forbes and used to be a blood-thirsty warblogger, back in the day. Yesterday she was shocked when her husband told her that "six agents from the joint terrorism task force" had knocked on her door. She dashed off a blog post on Medium, the lavishly-funded blogging start-up, claiming that all she'd done was searched Google for a pressure cooker, while her husband had looked up a backpack. The NSA's all-seeing eye has come home!

Catalano wrote:It was a confluence of magnificent proportions that led six agents from the joint terrorism task force to knock on my door Wednesday morning. Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling. 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.

Cue internet privacy shit-storm.

But the Suffolk County Police Department, which visited Catalano, now says in a statement that they visited Catalano's home yesterday because of an old-fashioned tip. A computer company discovered that one of their employees—presumably either Catalano's husband or son—had been conducting suspicious searches on their work computer, and contacted the police.

Police Statement wrote:Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. 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.”

Police interviewed the man and investigated the incident and found nothing. Thus, our dystopian privacy nightmare hellscape is slightly less nightmarish.

But the speed at which Catalano's post spread shows the resonance of any surveillance stories, post-Edward Snowden. The scope of the NSA's revelations must have led journalists and Twitter-ers to ignore the fact that Catalano's story seemed fishy from the beginning. This started with the exact nature of the authorities who visited her. At first she'd tweeted that the FBI had visited her home, but she later walked that back in her blog post to the vague "joint terrorism task force".

The Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) brings together the anti-terrorism efforts of many different federal, state and local agencies, which meant anyone from the FBI down to the local police could have visited her. Catalano's post led journalists down a rabbit warren of different agencies, searching for her uninvited houseguests with their panoptic powers. (Shortly after her blog post blew up, Catalano tweeted that she would not be giving interviews or additional details about her story.)

The resulting boon-doggle helped spread the story, and offered a glimpse into the fraught world of intragency anti-terrorism operations. An FBI spokeswoman, Kelly Langmesser, told Gawker that the visit was a local police matter conducted by the Nassau and Suffolk County Police Departments. But Detective Vincent Garcia, a spokesman for the Nassau County Police Department told me that his department had nothing to do with it.

"I read it, and I'm like, OK, this is kind of interesting. Is it even possible to do that?" Garcia said. "Probably, but I don't think my department has the ability to do that."

Then there was the matter of the fateful Google searches themselves. In her blog post, Catalano casts about for what flagged her family as potential bombers, and remembers that her son had been reading news reports about the Boston Bombing.

Catalano wrote: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.

That’s how I imagine it played out, anyhow. Lots of bells and whistles and a crowd of task force workers huddled around a computer screen looking at our Google history.

The actually scary part of Catalano's story—the creepy correlation of Google history in some distant control room—started, and ended, in her imagination.

Media critic Jay Rosen has coined the Snowden Effect, to talk about the flood of new, valuable information about the surveillance state sparked by NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden. But there's another Snowden Effect, an evil twin that lets bogus information latch onto the Snowden story like a parasitical fish on a whale, harnessing its unstoppable momentum to spread. This is what happened when The Observer, The Guardian's sister publication, was forced to retract bullshit single-source story based on a wacko former NSA analyst. Now bloggers are dressing up their otherwise unremarkable personal stories with creepy Snowdenesque flourishes, and credulous journalists are amplifying it because it seems of apiece with everything else going on.

This flailing is probably a consequence of our having a vast and intrusive electronic surveillance system whose contours are kept secret. If the FBI, or the cops, or whoever is actually mass-monitoring random people's Google searches, that's scary, and, given the recent NSA revelations, not out of the question. But Catalano's story doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know: Never trust someone who loves Quinoa.

General Havoc wrote:Indeed. Well caught. I was about to wax eloquent. Nobody needs that :)

General Havoc wrote:Josh, I cannot for the life of me fathom what, in all of God's creation, could possibly have given you the impression that I'm in the habit of customarily bottling up my eloquent wax.

Have our previous clashes given you the impression that I am some meek flower, afraid to voice my objections at full force?