Wanna see what happened?
Yup, six armed guys from the Joint Terrorism Task Force had come to Michele Catalano’s house at nine in the morning. Her husband went out to greet them; they asked if they could enter the house. Here’s Catalano’s description of the event:
They asked if they could search the house, though it turned out to be just a cursory search. They walked around the living room, studied the books on the shelf (nope, no bomb making books, no Anarchist Cookbook), looked at all our pictures, glanced into our bedroom, pet our dogs. They asked if they could go in my son’s bedroom but when my husband said my son was sleeping in there, they let it be.
Meanwhile, they 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.
Guys—do any of you feel significantly safer by having the federal government running around asking people if they have any bombs?
They got to equally tough questions—had he ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? Sure—said the husband, whom Catalano dubs, “ever the oppositional kind”—haven’t you? Two of the guys admitted they had.
The officers asked to do a cursory search—they missed two rooms (undoubtedly crammed with bombs, boys!) and never touched the computers. Oh, and they dropped the news that they do this a hundred times a week, and “99%” of the time, it turns out to be nothing. Catalano rightly wonders—what about the other 1%?
Well, the task force spent 45 minutes chatting with Catalano’s husband, and went pleasantly off to investigate the next terrorist. Here’s how Catalano concludes her piece:
This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.
All I know is if I’m going to buy a pressure cooker in the near future, I’m not doing it online.
I’m scared. And not of the right things.
Well, the question is—since the government is not supposed to be reading anyone’s email, how did the Joint Terrorist Task Force know Catalano’s family had googled “suspicious” sites? Were they connected to suspected terrorists? If so, how?
The bad news is that almost all of us are connected to suspected terrorists; here’s Yahoo News on the subject….
It hinges on what's known as "hop" or "chain" analysis. When the NSA identifies a suspect, it can look not just at his phone records, but also the records of everyone he calls, everyone who calls those people and everyone who calls those people.
If the average person called 40 unique people, three-hop analysis would allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist.
Right—so we have the Joint Terrorist Task Force investigating people who google pressure cookers, but not following up on Tamerlan Tsarnaev when the Russians go out of their way to tip off the FBI?
In the meantime, the head of NSA held up a placard stating that they had foiled 54 terrorist plots by using telephone and Internet data. Predictably, nobody in Congress trusts them. Who could?
Look, if it hadn’t been for Edward Snowden, they’d still be lying on their stack of Bibles. They were asked direct questions; they lied.
Which, by the way, is contempt of Congress. Anybody remember Rita Lavelle, the EPA official who lied to Congress in 1983? Here’s what she got, according to Wikipedia:
Indicted for lying to Congress; convicted; sentenced to 6 months in prison, 5 years probation thereafter, and a fine of $10,000
Throw the book at ‘em!
