
Employer Tipped Off Police In Pressure Cooker/Backpack-gate, Not Google - coloneltcb
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/01/employer-tipped-off-police-in-pressure-cookerbackpack-gate-not-google/
======
tptacek
I'm shocked, just shocked, that this turned out not to be the FBI dragnetting
Google searches.

~~~
mcphilip
I was with you on the original medium HN comment thread [1] and suggested that
the police possibly did pay a visit but not directly related to google
searches.

That being said, you're coming across like an asshole gloating about taking
the unpopular stand and being right.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6141873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6141873)

~~~
tptacek
I hope my comment is taken in the spirit in which it is intended, which is one
of gleeful mockery and not gloating; unfortunately, the dumber HN acts, the
dumber I end up looking for being here.

~~~
superconductor
Biting my lip so hard it's bleeding.

------
gcb0
And the damage control starts.

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. """

~~~
droithomme
The police police report says the employer (singular) noticed the searches
(plural) made on a workplace computer and reported to the FBI. The context is
a case where the wife searched for "pressure cooker", and the husband for
"backpack" at the same time.

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.”

~~~
pkinsky
It's not implausible that the employer's tip led to a full trawl of the
family's stored online history. Which, with what I'm sure is a shockingly high
false positive rate, found cause for suspicion.

~~~
tptacek
We also can't disprove that it was the Roswell aliens that secretly control
the Trilateral Commission that were behind the whole story.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
The only thing implausible here is that the FBI or other Federales would
reveal intelligence sources and methods so carelessly.

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.

~~~
tptacek
I respect that you managed to restate a point I spent ~500 words making in
just 70 words.

------
md224
From the Medium blog post:

> 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.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Just FYI: Typing "pressure cooker " into google search autocompletes to
"pressure cooker bomb"

~~~
droithomme
Great find! You are correct, it ranks even higher than "pressure cooker
recipes" in the Google autocomplete.

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](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.

~~~
tptacek
No, they shouldn't. It's hard to imagine anyone reading your comments or my
comments who believes that the police should have been called over these
Google searches.

------
mtgx
American culture is becoming so sad, especially when compared to what it used
to be. Now everyone might turn each other in for suspecting they are
terrorists. It reminds me of the communist days when people turned each other
in for speaking against the Party or the President. Such culture is a lot
harder to remove than one single tyrant. Very sad.

~~~
sologoub
This is not new, but rather wider-spread and with newer technology backing the
paranoia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism)

------
guelo
What kind of company has a web search triggered alert that trawls for
terrorism related keywords and secretly reports you to the police? They should
have said who the employer was so people can avoid working there.

~~~
freehunter
Honestly, I work in information security and for a long time I was the sole
information security analyst (the person who watches the logs and correlation
events from the security intelligence monitor) for a 14k employee company.
Even if I cared what people were searching for, to monitor Google searches on
employee computers would have taken a fair bit of resources that there's not a
great business need for unless you actually _are_ interested in what your
employees search for. I'm talking having the capabilities to man-in-the-middle
an SSL certificate as it passes your proxy server. It's not impossible, it's
not even difficult, but it does have a CPU impact on the server that's great
enough that you'd think twice about enabling that feature unless you had a
specific purpose to build your servers to enable that feature. That alone
makes me curious.

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...

~~~
lotharbot
There's a much simpler narrative than "company devotes substantial resources
to monitor all google searches":

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.

------
minimax
_If you see something suspicious taking place then report that behavior or
activity to local law enforcement or in the case of emergency call 9-1-1._

[http://www.dhs.gov/if-you-see-something-say-something](http://www.dhs.gov/if-
you-see-something-say-something)

These types of reports always increase after incidents like the Boston
bombings.

~~~
autodidakto
About a year after 9/11, I was taking pictures of a protestant church in
suburban New York as part of a loan assessment. The cops showed up and told us
someone had reported us as suspicious. He mentioned something about a mosque
being nearby but I didn't know if that meant we were supposedly from the
mosque or going after the mosque next. On the same trip, but later in
Philadelphia, I was hassled by a rent-a-cop outside of a random building for
carrying a camera.

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.

~~~
icebraining
Bob Dylan can't even take a walk before a concert:
[http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-207_162-5243217.html](http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-207_162-5243217.html)

------
robryan
Why was the employer going through a former employees browsing history?

~~~
lotharbot
It's fairly common, particularly with a just-terminated employee or one who
left on bad terms, to review any activity they undertook between "we're
letting you go" and the last time they actually left the building. Because
occasionally, just-terminated employees try to get revenge.

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.

------
ignostic
This is what happens when you have bloggers writing exclusive news rather than
journalists who know how to verify facts.

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.

~~~
icebraining
This wasn't a blogger writing an exclusive news, this was someone writing a
story that (allegedly) happened to herself.

------
detcader
Where is the press release exactly? It doesn't seem to be on Suffolk County's
website [1], which is what TechCrunch links to. EDIT: the author said in the
comments section that the SCPD emailed them the release.

[1]
[http://apps.suffolkcountyny.gov/police/morepress.htm](http://apps.suffolkcountyny.gov/police/morepress.htm)

------
rlwolfcastle
People were getting ahead of themselves in this story.

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.

------
quantumpotato_
It's not on
[http://apps.suffolkcountyny.gov/police/morepress.htm](http://apps.suffolkcountyny.gov/police/morepress.htm)
(yet?)

------
octotoad
Do we really have to append 'gate' to every potentially controversial news
event?

Looks and sounds even more ridiculous than usual in this case.

------
vitaltao
Glad to see thoughtcrimes are being properly investigated, in any case.

------
MrKurtz
The most disturbing and disappointing part of the whole story is how it spread
without even the slightest attempt to do any journalism work, and now that the
truth was uncovered hardly anyone is publishing or updating originals with
corrections and retractions:
[http://www.techmeme.com/130801/p52#a130801p52](http://www.techmeme.com/130801/p52#a130801p52)

It's fucking shameful.

~~~
dreamfactory
Is this report any more verified?

~~~
ewoodrich
There is a direct statement from the local police department.

[http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/screen-s...](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/screen-
shot-2013-08-01-at-3-46-53-pm.png?w=640)

