If you’ve heard that the feds raided a woman’s house after she innocently searched for a pressure cooker, and her husband for a backpack online, well, that’s not quite the whole story.
Freelance writer Michele Catalono attracted intense media attention today after blogging about a raid by “six agents from the joint terrorism task force.” She wrote that the raid was prompted by the fact that ” 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.”
According to Catalono, the combination in question involve her looking for a pressure cooker, her husband looking for a backpack, and her son having read news articles about the Boston marathon bombing. She then went on to recount that the raid was more of a cursory search accompanied by a lot of questions about pressure cookers, with a supposedly hilarious account of the officials not being familiar with quinoa. Cue outraged media reports of heavy-handed government snooping.
The problem is that most media reporting on Catalano’s blog post missed a key line, included right after her explanation of the mix-up caused by the combination of innocent search terms: “That’s how I imagine it played out, anyhow.”
In fact it turns out that not only was the visit to Catalano’s house nothing to do with any federal agency, but it wasn’t prompted by government monitoring of the Internet. Instead, as local police explained:
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.”
After interviewing the company representatives, Suffolk County Police Detectives visited the subject’s home to ask about the suspicious internet searches. The incident was investigated by Suffolk County Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Detectives and was determined to be non-criminal in nature.
To be fair to Catalano, she wrote, though hardly emphasized, that she’d merely assumed her search for kitchen equipment had attracted the attention of the security service. She did incorrectly identify who made the visit, raising questions about how the visitors introduced themselves and what she asked them.
The incident certainly raises issues about employers tracking what staff do on government equipment, along with what level of suspicion it takes to trigger a visit by six detectives, but it’s not an example of the National Security Agency’s monitoring program getting even more out of hand.