
Thank god for the war on Terror
We don't have anything to fear anymore!
Oh wait...
Freelance writer Michele Catalano thought she might get herself a pressure cooker to prepare Quinoa, the south American wonder-grain. Her husband wanted a new backpack. Both did what you do these days: go online and search for them. Catalano's husband did so from his work computer, and later left his job. Nothing to see here …
The attention was probably largely due to the boss. I doubt the searches alone caused any issue. Without knowing the content of the bosses call it's tough to say.
I know I haven't recieved a visit even after some searches for alcohol stoves that use a pressured fuel supply which probably would not look great. fwiw the stove is for camping and during frequent and prolonged power cuts. Much easier to grab alcohol (heet, even isopropyl) during a pre tsunami rush than butane \ petrol etc.
>Which of course is just how the terrorists want us to feel.
Terrorists: those who use fear for political ends.
The ones with official power or the others? So far the ones with official power have cost more in terms of deaths of innocents, deprivation of freedom and non-required spending of cash than the others.
Bother, it was click-bait!
The main problem being here is if 1 turns out to be something and they don't check.
Hell even 99.9% turn out to be bugger all that 0.1% is still kinda important. They have check shit out.
Its not like the dude had been dragged to a dark room and hit by rubber hoses. Security theather annoys teh crap out of me (3 suvs and what 6 or 8 guys? comeon thats gotta be taking the piss), but they do have to check when a mbr of the public drops a tip.
"The main problem being here is if 1 turns out to be something and they don't check."
Because when you go to trrrrrism school in Central Nowhereistan, the first thing they teach you is how to make a bomb with a backpack and a pressure cooker.
It's a sure tell. And not stupid at all, considering all the other things an informed trrrrist might use to blow shit up.
Why all the down votes. It sounds like a reasonable response to a tip off. They didn't drag him off, bash down the doors or go in guns blazing.
Yes disturbing and a little frightening, and I wouldn't like it to happen to me, but the officials involved have a duty to follow leads.
The only unreasonable action was of the ex-employer to leap from two innocent search term to the idea of terrorist and call in the cops.
" It sounds like a reasonable response to a tip off. They didn't drag him off, bash down the doors or go in guns blazing."
Guns blazing - bashing down doors, is much more UK Plod Style.
i.e. effectively lie to the judge to get a dodgy warrant, bash down the door and shoot the naked guy in his own bedroom
or accidentally shoot the suspect, as at Forrest Gate in 2006
So a single tip off follows leads by blockading someones house and scaring theshit out of them? How about some detective work first such as checking the internet logs from said company?
It was disproportionate, threatening and damn scary for the recipient.
My god, ive looked at stuff that could be seen in logs as being suzpect. I help out at am-dram making props and have looked at how easy it is to reactivate firearms so i can purposefully do the opposite on already deactivated ones etc.
"... and the other 1 time falls on our day off. It probably would have been nothing too, you know, past performance being a predictor of future behavior, so we KNOW there is a 99% chance of nothing. We are pretty confident of that. Yep, we spend our time on nothing, nothing at all!"
"Just out of curiosity, I wonder what would have happened if the person concerned won't talk to them and won't let them in without a warrant".
Hahahahaha. Very funny indeed. What do you think Homeland Security is going to do if a terrorist blockades himself in his compound and refuses to surrender? Legal rights are for decent honest upright citizens, not enemy combatants. They'd be lucky if Obama himself didn't decide to drop in with a Hellfire missile or the like.
Although I completely agree that this is a pretty good example of what can happen, even if you have "nothing to hide", it also shows another issue: be careful with the private stuff you do at work.
Even at my last job, where the boss was even OK with me hanging around on IRC on Friday, I never ever went online shopping while at work. At the very most visiting a news website or something, but that's about it.
Personally I think that's the main problem at hand here; don't treat your working environment as your personal living environment. It's not. You don't go shopping during lunch break, so why would you go do that stuff online?
I do not know in which wonderland you live, but around these parts of the world what I do in any of my breaks is my own bloody business. If need to buy something and if it I can do it within the allocated time to me for my break I am entitled to do so.
In any case, the lunch breaks aside, the culture of fear and thinking of everything from the perspective of "Am I doing the right thing? will the cops come for me?" is what differentiated USSR, East Germany and Romania from the rest of the world (even from some other countries in the Eastern block for that matter). What goes around, comes around. 20 years later things have gone full circle. The noise you are hearing is Suslov, Brezhnev and Cheushesku giggling madly in whatever circle of hell is assigned to scum like them.
There are employers out there who regard using the company internet for private purposes as grounds for dismissal. I hope that they get the sort of employees they richly deserve (ones so incompetent that they can't get a job anywhere more enlightened, and "seagull" mercenaries in it just for the money).
I go shopping in my lunch break all the time! Why wouldn't I, it's my time, the shops are in town, I'm in town, it seems the sensible thing to do.
I also clear my browser history when I leave a job (I can't clear the proxy logs of course, but it doesn't sound like they examined those)...
Going back to the story though, the guy shopped for a backpack, why would that cause his ex employer to call the police. His wife was shopping for a pressure cooker, on a different PC, on a different network. As it's been described there is no link between the backpack and the pressure cooker. Unless she actually borrowed his work laptop whilst at home to do that shopping.
So.. If I bought a cooking magazine, and had it open on my desk on a page about pressure cookers when the boss walked by, would that be incriminating too? Or is it only suspicious when done on the internet, because the girl behind the counter at Argos is really a highly trained MI5 profiler, and can spot suspicious explosive kitchenware purchasers... Right?
Do only suspicious people read up on things to find out what the best brand/specifications are?
And for reference, yes. I used to do my grocery shopping during my lunch hour. I worked about 2 minutes from a Safeway in Lewisham at the time, so it was a handy time to do it, and they would be shut by the time I left work. Pre open til midnight days. And we had a nice roomy fridge in the staff room.
Just out of curiosity.. If I bought a bunch of 7 segment displays, a mixed bag of coloured hookup wire, a bunch of 555 timers and some battery connectors, would I qualify for a watch list too? Because I did that a few months ago, and amazingly, the retailer I bought all this potential bomb making equipment from doesn't seem to have turned me in to the secret police. Perhaps I should report him for not reporting me, so we can all be watched in case we are tourists.
If you alter your behaviour to avoid suspicion, then is that not also being suspicious? And if this even crosses your mind, as anything but a joke, it is already too late.. The intimidation has worked.
Mine's the orange jump suit.
"Six gentleman in casual clothes emerged from the vehicles and spread out as they walked toward the house"
At that moment people should engage with their AR-15s.
Because if these guys happen to be cartel, then shit's gonna hit the fan. You better take down a few ASAP.
Do not forget to call 911. Apparently you can have "help", it's some sort of kool-aid.
To be honest if I saw 3 vehicles of uninvited unknown 'guests' spreading out and boxing me in my home I would certainly call the police and grab a selection of knives. That is because in the UK you cannot have a gun for home defence. Not 1 person would be entering without proper identification and I will demand the police authenticate the visitors or turn up.
I can imagine it would be very unsettling for a gang of plain clothes people to trap you in your home without any reason. Surely a single vehicle would have done (visible)
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Well they already got swords banned (kinda) which I always found confusing. Why would I go on a rampage with a large heavy piece of steel which, in the hands of average joe with no training, isn't as dangerous as it seems, when I can go into a kitchen drawer and grab a pair of freakin huge butchers knives which can cut through most anything, as well as stab and they're perfectly easy to weild as weapons, far simpler for average joe to carry around than a katana for cods sake.
Just a moment, there's somebody at the door.
*doesn't come back*
They've just had a court case on this very point in the US.
Acording to judge dredd and jury, the apparent interpretation of "stand your ground" means your legally allowed to pre-emptively open fire on "scary people", regardless of whether they are armed or not.
So 6 heavies spreading out and heading for your property and person, probably counts.
I do so love the "well thought through" laws passed on both sides of the pond by the elected morons trying to fill their sound byte quota with "tough sounding" measures!
PS
here in the UK the definition of the word "reasonable" was changed in the self-defence rules, so we have the same dumb set up (i.e. it is a defence to say I thought he was a threat to my life, regardless of any actual evidence to support that claim), thanks to section 76 of criminal justice and imigration act 2008 (sat between "offences relating to nuclear materials" and "unlawfully obtaining personal data")
PPS
if you're trying to figure why the long standing and working UK self defence law got changed, remember that the met had just finished dodging lots of questions about shooting unarmed tube users.
Can we "overload" the system and take that 99 times per week up to 999 times per week and make the whole thing even more pointless at which time they either abandon the whole PRISM tech, or...do they just buy more black SUVs and get a bigger discount at The Gap for their casual clothes?
Not to mention your gov't will just build a new dentention centre on your tax dollah and throw you and your irksome chums in it while they 'get round to processing you' as they're always happy to go to the expense to make an example of you when the other option is not behaving like the Establishment. Plus building a new DC puts much dollah into the hands of their pals who run construction co's and detention facility contracts.
Boof goes your job and your mortgage and the gov't says 'That's what you get, son'.
(Yes I know how to spell 'dollar', before someone thinks they're clever/funny. Use a Vietnamese/etc accent in your head.)
I used to download copious quantities of porn from work computers back when doing that sort of thing was fashionable.
I never had black SUVs front up at our place though.
Perhaps they *should* have, I wouldn't have turned into the deviant I am today.
However, I never downloaded music or movies though - that's just plain wrong and would have the men in black on my doorstep instantly. (cough, cough).
Thank you RIAA and MMPA, you've made porn socially acceptable - too bad for backpacks and cookers...
If you want a picture of the present, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
Our beloved PM (NZ) has recently tried to invoke Al-Qaeda in trying to get the latest snooping bill though
1984 was supposed to be a warning not an instruction manual.
I wonder how long it will be before the sheeple get pissed off & demand changes
“WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”
> I wonder how long it will be before the sheeple get pissed off & demand changes
Probably never.
The great thing about our mass-media, always-on world is that we can be shown the "results" of terror attacks live on TV, and then over and over again. Positive reinforcement is a wonderful thing and imprints certain "facts" on the public. Like every time you see a plane fly into an office block it reinforces the view that the threat is current and as real today as it was ten or twelve years ago. After that, it's just a case of sitting back and letting public opinion paranoia do the rest.
The worst outcome a terror attack can have (for the perpetrators) is not that it fails, it's that nobody talks about it.
Because you've seen that in a climate of government induced paranoia the slightest thing would cause people to inform on you and trigger an extreme response from the same government?
Do the math.
Chance of being involved in a terrorist incident. Practically zero.
Chance of being involved in a federal "questioning" where some twitchy Fed yells "gun" and it all kicks off. Quite high.
I'd say she's just starting to realize who she should be scared of.
This happened because of the employer's report and the employer is a credible source because they are supposed to know the employee quite well.
Even after the employer made the claim they did not just take his word for it, they used the households search history to determine the threat.
The search history not only revealed the backpack and pressure cooker, it also revealed that the son visited bomb making sites and the husband had some dodgy (but not revealed by the wife) search history from his previous job.
The officials didn't turn up immediately, like the article implies, it was several weeks later after investigations. They performed a cursory search and asked enough questions to satisfy themselves that no threat existed.
Given the information they had, their actions were reasonable and proportionate (even if you do not like how they obtained the information).
> That hardly makes the son a hard-core bomb maker ...
I never claimed it did. It was one more piece of information that the authorities evaluated when they decided to question them. It wasn't simply "pressure cooker" and "backpack" it was "pressure cooker", "backpack", "how to build a bomb", husband's dodgy browsing history (from ex-employer) and a report from the ex-employer.
And you never, ever, hear about people who find themselves out of work (it is unclear whether the husband had a new job or not, the visits to China and Korea might have been his old job), who go mental and try to kill as many people as possible.
I guess they're lucky their son wasn't academically inclined and worried about future energy security. He might have wanted to find out the relative merits of conventional nuclear reactors (which create chemically separable Pu239 which can be made into A-bombs) and the mooted Thorium reactors (which breed chemically separable U233), and whether one can make an A-bomb from U233.
I never did find a definitive answer to that last one. I wonder what lists I volunteered myself onto?
Land of the free - right up until you do or say anything that the authorities deem "suspicious". That's where your freedom ends - abruptly and completely.
Just as freedom of speech nowadays seems to mean freedom to say anything you like, just as long as nobody is offended or upset by it.
"In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either".
- Mark Twain
and not enough funding for safety inspectors in texas to stop ammonia nitrate explosions in fertiliser plants.
15 dead, 160 injured, large chunk of town literally a bomb site, but the DHS can still find the money to employ more gropers at US airports....effective use of tax payer dollars?
"and not enough funding for safety inspectors in texas to stop ammonia nitrate explosions in fertiliser plants."
No. It's a fertilizer, not an explosive.
Now if you were to reclassify it as an explosive then the BATFE would be all over them like a rash.
Of course the American farming system would go down the pan as every farmer had to get an explosives license and secure storage facility for this explosive.
Funny how 15 dead and 160 injured (for an industrial "accident") is an "acceptable" loss and 3 dead in the Chicago Marathon bombing is not.
Making fertiliser is a multi-billion dollar business (and very profitable too). No way is the government going to interfere with that: remember, "the business of America is business". And the business of the president and the armed forces (and Homeland Security) is to grease the wheels of business.
Business control of US politicians is why we have the DHS in the first place.
The september 1996 White House Commission on Aviation Safety initially recomended europe style secuirty for airports, airline companies whinge to their paid for politicians, secuirty recomendations get dropped by VP Al Gore.
and amlost 5 years to the day they removed the "expensive" secuirty recomendations, the consequence arrived at the World Trade Centre......thus creating the DHS.
I quite often feel that I don't want to be a member of the human race any more. But then, just as I'm reflecting how difficult it would be to to manage that, I remember that 95 percent or so of us are perfectly decent, harmless, kind, and constructive. Some of the 95 percent are also brilliant, creative, and outstandingly altruistic (usually not all at once, though).
It's the dominant 5 percent who cause all the trouble: climbing the greasy pole, stamping on human faces, oppressing, stealing, conning, killing, cheating, lying.
Yes there is a plausible argument that without that nasty 5 percent, the human race would have died out long ago from sheer lack of initiative.
It's a strange universe, and it wasn't built for our comfort. Nor were we.
Maybe easier in Europe for this one? Here in the EU one has an expectation of privacy in a lot of contexts. You employer should not be reading your e-mails without good reason.
In the USA, as far as I can tell you have no expectation of privacy unless you are talking to your priest, your doctor, or your lawyer.
Cook Quinoa regularly, don't own a pressure cooker. Takemoments too cook. one of the things least likely to need a pressure cooker ever.
Could have svaed a few bucks and not had the 5-0 shuffle through their underwear drawers had they simply googled "Quinoa recipes" first.
Okay, so "100 times a week"..."99 times...", that's a 1% hit rate for an undisclosed bounty.
What happens, do they actually find a 'pressure cooker in a backpack'?
Like flies around ...
'errorists ain't as stoopid as we're led to believe...
Soon robo-cop will be all they're prepared to send in 100 times a week...
I bet robo-cop won't be interested in quinoa...
Icon 'cos title
I'm pretty convinced we've not been given the facts.
If the black helicopter platoons are going to be activated every time someon goes online to research a pressure cooker, the only thing that is going to get cooked is the law enforcement budget.
I'm not buying it. What I DO buy, is a dirty trick by the former employer. WHY did he start going through the search history of a former employee ? This smells of payback.
I suspect the employer was asked why on earth he wanted to examine former employees' computer use, and being fearful there would be privacy issues, he cooked up a plot to explain his sudden interest in someone that no longer worked for him anyway.
So he invented all manner of slip-of-the-tongue, clues and other bull. By the time he finished the poor ex employee was chairman of the worldwide Osama fanclub.
"If the black helicopter platoons are going to be activated every time someon goes online to research a pressure cooker, the only thing that is going to get cooked is the law enforcement budget".
With the greatest of respect, I believe that that turns out not to be the case. Given that my previous comment was presumably wrong - this incident happened in the USA, not Blighty - remember that the US federal government has shovelled literally trillions of dollars into the financial system, to replace those supposedly "lost" by curiously inept bankers. It has spent well north of $3 trillion on completely unnecessary (to say the very least) wars in Asia in the past ten years alone. It actually wants to inflate the dollar, so as to reduce the effective scale of its vast and unpayable debts.
Homeland Security is funded on a scale considerably larger than most nations' entire armed forces. And the more "suspicious activity" they find, the more staff they can hire and the bigger their budget will become. It's all good, from their point of view - until, that is, the rest of the world suddenly grasps one day that the emperor really is naked, and that dollars aren't worth the paper they are printed on (although of course most of them exist only inside compuers anyway).
I read to the end of the fine article in the belief that it must have happened in the USA. (The use of the term "SUV" rather than "Chelsea tractor" may have influenced me). Then suddenly the word "Suffolk" leaped out at me. Wha...??? Is that Suffolk Virginia, Suffolk Maine, or one of the many Suffolks in California?
We have it from many reliable sources, from the ancient Greeks to Jorge Luis Borges and Bertrand Russell, that police states are rendered tolerable only by the extreme inefficiency of the police. Gestapo meets the Keystone Cops, sort of. But now it seems that technology has enabled the secret police (for what else are we to call those casually-clad chaps in the SUVs?) to harrass wholesale.
Last but far from least, how the hell did they satisfy themselves that the Catalanos were not, in fact, cooking up a bomb? According to the article, they just hung out and chatted for a while. Not very rigorous. Proper security entails responding only to real - or plausible - threats, and investigating them thoroughly. Whereas these people appear to be doing the exact opposite: responding to thousands of false alarms, and getting into the habit of finding there is nothing to them.
It's as good a way as any of keeping the otherwise unemployed in paying work. But on the whole I would prefer John Maynard Keynes' idea of having them dig holes in the ground and then fill them in again.
I wonder what that 1 remaining visit turns out to be. Maybe, like, if 1% of visits produce terrorists, drug plantations, sweat shops (nah, scrap that, that's legal), etc, then maybe this is the key - and they should carry out those random searches on regular basis. And, you know, random searches in shopping malls... airports... oh, sorry, they already do that. These fine measures used to go by the popular name of "round ups" (yes, I know we're still looking for evil terrorists, not those with missing IDs). In fact, if the ratio is so low (1/100), why not streamline it and, like, lock down the whole street and search every house, and every person. I'm sure they'll uncover "something"
1/2 off topic: as the technical terms is "roundup", I tried to see what it was in German, just to see what no-name they would come up. Shockingly, this term is totally unknown in German. I looked up wikipedia, and other reliable sources, like... wikipedia. Nothing. Nichts. Null....
99% of visits turn out to be nothing
99% of visits that don't turn out to be nothing turn out to be insignificant.
99% of visits that are more than insignificant turn out to be households with criminal proceedings already underway.
The rest get fitted up because they're bored by now.
The black SUV's are everywhere man, everywhere. You may not see them driving around but they are parked nearby somewhere. Here in the U.S. the black SUV's are often kept at the self storage facilities outside of most, even tiny, towns. They rent space for them in the same parking areas people park their RV's, campers and trailers at. Secure facilities with 24/7 access and basically hidden in plain site.
As an aside, the Loudoun County Adult Detention Center (the jail) in Leesburg, Virginia (USA) has an entire mechanized unit in their hanger. The equipment, complete with anti-armor weapons, is there in case the Feds need them.
"The black SUV's are everywhere man, everywhere. You may not see them driving around but they are parked nearby somewhere."
Now I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist...
Well the the US govt has had to fail out all the big auto makers (Is Chrysler on it's 3rd)?
What better way to kick start their next years sales than a bulk order for some American automotive icons?
Thus the Federal departments of Treasury, Prisons and Homeland Security work together to keep employment high and the prison business filled.
Whoopee for investing in America's future (as a police state).
"Of course I'm not building a bomb, officer!! Have a nice day, bye!"
Well, duh! Like they'd admit to searching online for how to build a bomb. I'm guessing the 1/100 it does turn out to be "something" is when the poor sod who's door-step they've turned up on happens to be of Middle Eastern appearance so automatically gets the rubber hose treatment.
Using his employer's computer for personal google searches was a bad idea. Employers can, will, and do monitor your internet browsing history and e-mail. Knowing that, I personally do not use my employer's computer equipment to do any personal Google searches. Since I work in Tech Support, I only occasionally visit relevant technology sites (like this one), for which, I cannot be sanctioned. I also do not send personal e-mails from my employer's computers. I use my smart phone for personal use, for e-mail, web browsing, and internet searches, which my employer cannot monitor nor tamper with. Had her husband used his smart phone for such searches instead of his employer's computer, this episode would not have happened.
has to look up the internet to find out how to make a "pressure cooker bomb"? Surely it can't be any more complicated than (a) make a big bomb, (b) put it in the pressure cooker with some bits of metal, and (c) close the pressure cooker.
Admittedly, I've never done this or looked it up, but I fail to see how it's any different (mutatis mutandis) from a pipe bomb. Isn't the name totally suggestive of the recipe for making it to anyone with two brain cells to rub together? That being so, does knowing the name of the device then constitute an offence for "possessing knowledge likely to be of use to a terrorist"? (Yes, that's actually a real crime where I live!)
Well, according to Fox News & and a few Congressmen, it requires not only overseas training by an experienced bomb builder but also a sponsor with significant financial resources and a cadre of supporters at home all conspiring to design and build this 'weapon of mass destruction'.
If nothing else I think all this reflects very poorly on the US education system. Basic primary school science teaches you (or used to anyway) everything you need to know about doing this of you wanted. The fact so many people think it takes supervillain levels of knowledge and resources means there are a lot of idiots with poor educations in charge of the news and Congress.
"If nothing else I think all this reflects very poorly on the US education system. Basic primary school science teaches you (or used to anyway) everything you need to know about doing this of you wanted. The fact so many people think it takes supervillain levels of knowledge and resources means there are a lot of idiots with poor educations in charge of the news and Congress."
Indeed. The quality of the US domestic terrorist has gone through the floor since the Oklahoma City bomb and the apprehension of the unibomber.
It's not like there aren't enough expatriot Ulsterman with the necessary skills wondering around the land of the free to improve education in the pyrotechnic field should that be necessary.
I've always wondered why the 9/11 perpetrators had to have overseas backers funding them or planning the attack, or anything. It looks pretty simple (if terrifying): (1) Buy airline tickets; (2) board aircraft; (3) seize aircraft; (4) fly aircraft into buildings. Thus, everyone involved in the plot was probably dead by end of the attacks.
But that would be profoundly unsatisfying. How can you get revenge on people who are already dead - and, what's more, intentionally dead?
I'm pleased to read this. It shows that the authorities are, in fact, taking things seriously, as they should. The guys boss is also to be congratulated for his vigilance. OK, these two were innocent, and all they got was an interview by the Men in Black. The regular American way, if we are to believe the press, is to drag them to Guantanamo and then interrogate them for 25 years without trial with the waterboard, or ship them to Saudi and get their friendly cops to get a confession under torture. It's good to know their budget doesn't run to that for everyone.
It looks like the lads in Blighty are a little cornfused on this story. There was no "swooping on this family".
The FACTS are that the guy's former employer found unusual searchs on the guy's work computer for back packs and pressure cookers. After the Boston bombing where pressure cookers were used to build bombs and then left in back packs on the street to kill and injure people, it was very wise of the guy's former employer to alert authorities. The authorities conducted an interview at the guys residence and concluded he was not a threat. I'd say this was excellent work by the guy's former employer and authorities. They may have prevented more deaths and destruction by investigating these abnormal computer searches. that's all there is to the story despite the sensationalism by The Rag.
This means that the NSA actually did examine their emails.. So they do snoop on all Americans!
Wait! Wait! They denied that, and it's probably illegal anyway!
Wait! Wait! They paid the UK to look at the data stream. It isn't illegal for UK to examine foreign data. Then the UK fed back "a suspicious email trail" to the NSA, where using "foreign gained intelligence" on US nationals isn't illegal.
That's what the $100M is for!
Of course, we could make a good number of FBI agents redundant and save some cash, and maybe do the same at NSA. It appears that they can do these raids in the 100's, so clearly they have way too much time on their hands.
Anyone that has read the article and defends the actions of the authorities is getting down voted.
It is absolutely ridiculous. The Fire Dept gets calls to House Fires that are Bonfires, Police get called to disturbances that are just loud movies and the FBI get called called to potential terrorists that were just a couple doing some personal shopping on work time.
Unfortunately these things happen and when a lot of your leads come from public information there will be more false leads with Anti Terrorist information.
The Agents themselves most likely thought this is going to be dead end but they have to follow up, just as the fireman heading off to a prank call would.
This is not an "Enemy of the State" or "V for Vendetta" paranoid government action, but reasonable suspicion followed up by a non violent visit and conversation.
I'm not saying there isn't an erosion of civil liberties or too much surveillance on law abiding citizens, because there is. But this was a simple case of something looking like something it wasn't.
Lizard agents of the shadow government are influencing this board.
They don't want people thinking Agents are going about their jobs with out needless threats and violence, they want people to be in fear of every nature of the Government and Law enforcement.
Any notion of Anti terrorism units calmly talking to people, respecting peoples property and quietly leaving must be quashed. People must be made to fear their government its only through fear can they have control.
"People must be made to fear their government its only through fear can they have control."
No, elements of the government want to create fear so that the people will accept their control.
Perhaps you should view " The Power of Nightmares "?
I'm well aware of the ideas of Fear and Control. FUD has been used and continues to be used.
The only reflection of the Effect of FUD with in this story is from the ex-employer that called the cops on a search History of "Pressure Cooker" and Backpack.
Yes its unfortunate their son looked at a "How a Pressure Cooker Bomb Works" online. But the authorities acted with respect and due diligence.
"Should I turn myself in?"
Of course not.
Your surveillance and interrogation have already been scheduled.
Turning yourself in now will play havoc with the carefully planned (and costed) staffing chart.
But your thoughtfulness has been noted and is appreciated, citizen.
Of course, it would get you any actual leniency....
Having close relatives geographically dispersed means that I am in effect travelling from home to home, I was searched when returning to Britain, and I was revealed to be carrying some curtains, and a bin lid (it was a pricey Brabantia one). That caused some minor amusement.
Later I was asked to bring a pressure cooker back, as we had two, and one was redundant (technically both are, one is used for cooking without the top), I refused, as they're two a penny where I was being asked to take it, and I didn't fancy being asked why I was carrying it. Then I was told oh not to worry, they'll probably go through it anyway, and find it empty (apart from clothes stuffed in it), to which I made the point, look what happened in the US, problem is what one can do with it afterwards.
So recently someone wishes to take an elderly relative up to some mountain range, I point out that the air is quite thin and not good for him, and the air pressure is lower than it is in an aircraft, said relative having ruled out air travel. So I'm busy googling aircraft cabin pressures to get the figures right (yes I was right), but in the back of my mind there was a worry over which spook/program would be sitting there monitoring what I was googling...
"So recently someone wishes to take an elderly relative up to some mountain range, I point out that the air is quite thin and not good for him, and the air pressure is lower than it is in an aircraft, said relative having ruled out air travel. So I'm busy googling aircraft cabin pressures to get the figures right (yes I was right), but in the back of my mind there was a worry over which spook/program would be sitting there monitoring what I was googling..."
It's called a "false positive."
And you can bet there will be plenty of them.
Some think that's a bug. Some think it's a feature.
Depends what you want to do. a) Catch actual terrorists b) Scare the s**t out of the population forever.
Yes, try to avoid doing anything private or seemingly dubious at work, I certainly try not to, including not making personal purchases at work, and I'm amazed the obviously private stuff people occasionally stupidly do at work using company equipment; however this was still defacto defamation by the employer, and they should be sued for this idiotic reasoning and shameful action, as should the state!
The Wife sure has the right idea now, if rather late!
The problem this story shows is not any one specific thing but the culture that has built up that says that people are essentially untrustworthy and should be suspected by default.
That started as a 'genuine' public reaction but has since been stoked by the government (not just in the US) and their agencies, resulting in more fear than any terrorist plot has ever achieved.
The trick (and it's not an overly sophisticated one) is to turn any result or situation into proof that the government is doing the right thing.
Evidence of terrorist activity? That means we need more surveillance and power to counter these threats. No evidence of terrorist activity? You'd think that would mean the opposite but you'd be wrong. What it ACTUALLY means is that the terrorists are even more nefarious than ever, which requires - shock - more surveillance and power.
This was not an instance of government monitoring but it WAS an excellent example of the fruits of the government's unrelenting FUD policy. As such, I view it as even more worrying than said government monitoring.
It reminded me of a poster (had to look up the exact wording) in a Red Dwarf episode where the crew find themselves in a fascist fantasy world - see the title of the post.