Many, many thousands of pressure cookers are sold every year. Terrorist attacks are extremely rare. Millions and millions of backpacks are sold every year. The intersection of those two products isn't helpful. The base rate theorem dictates that pressure cooker sales will turn out to be a very poor signal for terrorism.
This article posits (or is trying to sell you on the idea) that the FBI watches for pressure cooker sales on the Internet and dispatches teams of extremely expensive FBI agents to investigate them. Stipulate that the FBI has access to that information (I don't think they do, but whatever). What the FBI isn't going to do is compromise sources and methods in a pressure cooker dragnet. They are mathematically assured not to find terrorists that way. But they'd make a huge amount of noise. They don't burn sources for no good reason.
I don't buy this, at all.
Also not helpful, if you're trying to sell a hoax: the too-vivid callbacks to the Boston bombers, and to the FBI's television show image.
Later
Note also that this story wants you to infer that the FBI told her husband that they were following up on Internet search leads. Not only did they roll trucks to a residence to do a search that was almost mathematically guaranteed to come up blank, but when they did that, they hinted around at the secret program that got them to do it.
TFA: "They asked my husband about his work, his visits to South Korea and China"
I'd say the NSAs '3 steps' policy is far more likely. The husband interacts with someone overseas who interacts with someone else who is on a list somewhere. [1] The NSA does the routine profile on everyone within three steps of the-guy-on-the-list, some key words generate hits, salaried agents get another address to visit.
That possibility doesn't get hung up on the problematic notion that anyone's setting up such visits based on google searches alone, nor implies a JTTF agent caughed up real information on how they actually got their lead or why they were actually there.
[1] If you're doing business on the Chinese mainland, it seems pretty likely you'll be within three steps of 'potential terrorists', given the whole cyber cold war and economic espionage thing.
I was disappointed that it took her 14 paragraphs to get to this. She starts "I was buying a pressure cooker and my husband was looking at backpacks" when she should have started "my husband makes frequent trips to China and Korea ..." Less frenzy that way I guess.
Mentioning the connection to foreign business casually, once, while spending the bulk of the 'story' hyping some implication that the government is profiling people based on web searches alone shows a tabloid-leaning lack of respect for the reader.
The writer's burying what should be a relevant example of "why even innocent people shouldn't like this NSA spying/profiling" (which we know to exist and know has policies that could likely result in their visit from the JTTF) under a largely-implausible theory (that has no substantiating evidence from any whistleblower or leak to date, nor does it present any) that ultimately serves no purpose but self-promotion.
(It looks like an attempt to make her experience the center of it's own story, as opposed to a contributing piece of the larger Snowden/NSA story.)
Truth and accuracy aside, why would her experience not be the center piece?
I think the personal experience of 'everyday citizens' is enormously important in understanding issues of privacy and (self-)censorship.
In fact, highlighting the consequences for 'regular people' arguably contributes more to that understanding than the zillionth story about 'exceptions' like Assange/Snowden/RandomIranianBlogger. In the end those are (seen as) edge-cases.
Hackernews and other websites latching on to the 'technical' part of the story is understandable, but whether it was the quinoa or the pressure cooker or her husband's business dealings isn't the real subject of this story - the real insight provided by this story is the fact that she was left in a state of distress, leading to her questioning her every day communications/searches...
"I think the personal experience of 'everyday citizens' is enormously important in understanding issues of privacy and (self-)censorship."
Which is what I said.
"The writer's burying what should be a relevant example of "why even innocent people shouldn't like this NSA spying/profiling""
Her experience should be the center of her article. I'm talking about her pushing a silly theory that the NSA is doing a web search dragnet in an attempt to make her article the center of a fork from the larger story of NSA spying. And as the theory is generally silly, it simply distracts and detracts from the root NSA spying story, instead of reinforcing it and adding a direct human/emotional anchor for it.
Buried it? It's plain as day in her own story. Your characterization as "14 paragraphs" sure is dishonest considering the size of her "paragraphs" that are broken up only to make it more readable. Sure, it's not the headline but nor should it be. It's irrelevant if he travels to China or Korea. China and Korea are not equivalent to Afghanistan or Nigeria. And frankly even travel to those places shouldn't warrant a warrantless parade of police into your house.
Thousands if not millions of people make business visits to Asia - South Korea, Japan, China - every year. How it can be otherwise if most high-tech equipment used in the US is produced there? Are you saying it is completely normal for them to get a visit from the police and get questioned about their kitchen inventory, nothing out of the ordinary here?
"Potential terrorist" is a very vague term. Anybody who is alive and not brain-dead can be "potential terrorist". However I don't see how you explain the police asking questions about pressure cookers. Is that just a common thing - anybody that visits China gets a visit from the police that ask them if they make a pressure cooker bombs, just in case? Like the routine "How are you, sir? Is everything alright? How was your China trip? Did you make any pressure cooker bombs today? How about tomorrow? Good day to you, sir, then!".
"The NSA does the routine profile on everyone within three steps of the-guy-on-the-list, some key words generate hits, salaried agents get another address to visit."
By routine profile, I meant "of the data we all already know the NSA has access to, such as google search history/mail content/etc".
e.g. they may have been on an 'automated search' list for being at three-degrees-of-'terrorist'-kevin-bacon and then got on a 'physical visit' list for trips to china + a few keyword hits in the web activity logs. at which point it seems obvious they would ask about pressure cooker bombs, even though they weren't there just because someone had searched online for pressure cooker bombs.
Now, I'm certainly not defending the NSAs list-making justifications nor accuracy. The whole thing is bullshit.
But this story looks like a textbook use of the bullshit programs we (now/all) know about. And it gives us no reason to theorize the existence of some new (trivially unsustainable, useless) program.
Pressure cooker seems to be very specific topic. There are a real lot of ways to make bombs. Yet more to cause general havoc - terrorism doesn't have to be just with explosives. Yet the questioning, as reported, was very focused - which raises the suspicion that it was related to the other piece of information that was focused on the same topic.
As for if they got it from "old" or "new" NSA programs - I don't think anybody really cares at this stage. What one would care is if his next google search would lead to a 3am SWAT visit with flashbang grenades or just a friendly visit from a bunch of armed guys in SUVs. That's the worrying part, not the name of the program the government uses to make it happen.
Of course it's focused: they almost certainly used their web traffic to pre-screen.
We already know from the slides that they do searches of their ill-gotten web traffic against a laundry list of keywords. Probably, every single remotely terrorist-sounding keyword.
I'd imagine "Ruby Ridge" and "fertilizer bomb" and "jihad" are in there as well. But the agents only need to mention "pressure cooker bombs" because that's what they'd actually gotten hits on.
The question is whether it makes more sense for this visit to have been the result of google alone (unlikely-to-implausible) or was the result of being pre-targetted for other reasons, which then brought their web activity under scrutiny (which fits everything we already know about the NSA's processes and policies and the facts in this case).
What about Justin Carter, a 19-year old recently freed on $500,000 bail for another Facebook post?
So we know that Federal (and State) law enforcement spends resources following up very tenuous leads.
As far as burning sources and methods, what else would you have them do to follow up on this specific lead? Six agents interviewing someone for an hour seems less expensive than weeks or months of surveillance.
What does it matter if the account is true or false? It's completely plausible.
You're not following. Yes, Bayes says that following up on stupid Facebook posts is also a waste of time. But the cost of following up on Facebook posts is low; nobody is surprised that the FBI finds out about stupid threats you post to Facebook, because Facebook is essentially public. The cost of following up on a Google dragnet is very high; the whole artifice of the Internet surveillance program is that it's not used this way.
Note that I'm not saying that Internet surveillance data doesn't get used this way. I'm saying that when it does, the USG sure as shit doesn't advertise the fact. They don't burn sources and methods for no good reason.
Why is this even a debate about expense? Even if it cost the government $0 to store data on all americans and send agents to search peoples homes and question them it would not make it right for them to do it.
This is a basic question of what freedoms individuals have. If you make the laws so complicated and or secretive that no one can comply with them then the entire system fails. You have 3 letter agencies running around selectively enforcing overly complex/secret laws then the very foundation of what the law is meant to do breaks. Selective enforcement equals political influence equals the Rule of Men, not the Rule of Law.
Because the thread of this conversation is plausibility, and the OP article lacks a great deal of that, as pointed out by tptacek. Nobody here is arguing that this surveillance is correct, only that the sequence of events in the story makes no damn sense.
No, he didn't. That's an Internet meme, not a revealed truth. The USG may very well be abusing SIGINT to profile the whole US population, but it is not true that they're doing that openly.
Didn't the NSA just admit the existence of XKEYSCORE in a press release? [1] They pretty much verified much of what the Guardian had reported, while denying widespread, unchecked analyst access to data. And this blog post reveals a "foreignness factor" which would justify the search.
Oh, "internet memes," such pesky things! Why, every time there's a new Chuck Norris joke there are congressional hearings and amendments being debated! Such trouble! And remember that last time someone posted a cute cat video, and congresspeople made statements left and right (some of them even validating what the cat video said)?
My my, what trouble those "internet memes" get us into.
You sure did a lot there to avoid refuting his point (and avoid saying anything substantial, I might add). His point is that the actual abuse hasn't been documented, and they surely wouldn't do it in such a silly way as this article suggests if they were abusing it in this manner.
EDIT: I do believe there's a difference between the potential for abuse and actual abuse. But I further believe the potential for abuse from global surveillance is so significant that even the potential is a dire problem in its own right. I was a bit too flippant about that distinction above.
Incidentally, I love the mentality that says that the USG is using optical splitters to record all the traffic on the Internet, built a data center sufficient to archive it, built the database technology sufficient to enable the entire NSA and FBI realtime access to that data, compromised SSL CAs, but is too dumb not to tell strangers about their secret programs on random visits.
It's like in the movies, when the evil mastermind has the hero tied to a chair suspended over the laser shark tank, but monologues long enough for the hero to find a way to escape.
Apparently at least one FBI counterterrorism agent did this very thing, on national television. I think you are seriously underestimating FBI agents' big mouths.
but is too dumb not to tell strangers about their secret programs on random visits.
The group of people that are doing this random visits are not imbued in the same culture of secrecy as the NSA. Furthermore, the larger a program, the more and more casual a group of people are going to be about protecting it. It's the fault of our social programming -- if nearly everyone I deal with on a daily basis is in on a secret, I am far more likely to share that secret. This is probably the reason that nobody talks about their own secret projects at the NSA.
Your line of reasoning was what I used to assume about the type of NSA style data collection: "Gathering and using data information about every American would be an immense task, requiring lots of people -- if such a program existed, we probably would have found out about it now."
It turns out -- we are finding out about it for precisely that reason.
You're picturing the organization as a single mind and mentality when it's composed of many thousands of people with many motivations and levels of competence. The agents on the ground aren't the same as those who build the fancy technology (and in this case the agents who visited the author of the blog post were from a completely different organization).
This is how spying works in general--find one of the inevitably many people in a secret organization who will, in the right compromised situation (alcohol, a romantic affair, etc.), brag about their knowledge of state secrets.
Or look at Bradley Manning, who among other things exposed the fact that low level operatives have access to far more secret data than one would have imagined. His motivation (which led him to release all the data) differed from the organization's overall motivation in an extreme way.
I love the mentality that says that the USG is [doing complicated technical things], but is too dumb not to tell strangers about their secret programs on random visits.
That's not a mentality, that's being aware the USG consists of millions of people, exactly the opposite of
It's like in the movies, when the evil mastermind has the hero tied to a chair
Thomas, the sane HN readers have stopped venturing into the NSA threads. You've made a valiant effort, and its charitable of you to keep the truthers distracted from attacking other threads, but it's time to leave them behind.
The cops in question were apparently local members of a Joint Terrorism Task Force. They get these tips from "the government", check them out, the people are once again not terrorists, and they then talk to them freely like normal people, because (1) they are and (2) the cops aren't NSA, don't have training in this kind of secrecy and don't care, and (3) do pretty well by classifying people into sheep and goats without worrying that some of the sheep might be cleverly disguised goats or have goat friends.
So yeah, this part of the story is entirely plausible to me.
Not to pick on you, but this meme is so grating to read over and over. "Government is incompetent" is an easy, lazy narrative that distracts from the immense complexity that is government (especially the US government).
Government is neither competent nor incompetent. It is a vast collection of organizations composed of humans that vary from grossly negligent paycheck collectors to shockingly effective strategic geniuses. Bureaucracy is the friction inherent in the system; different people clog and lubricate its workings to different aims, which range from the purest altruism to the most cynical abuse.
A government may be incompetent in solving issues in the interest of their constituents, but these people are cream-of-the-crop professionals at accumulating power.
This does seem implausible and I understand why. This program couldn't last more than a couple weeks, right?
But 2 things, neither of which are solid, can't rule it out (for me): if all search engines are monitored, what does it matter if the sources and methods are revealed? The adversary won't have much use for that information, unless they stop using the Internet altogether. It's a dumb argument, sure, but I could see it used as justification.
Second: does FBI leadership think a program like this could have prevented Boston? If they think this program is a good idea, I would not put it past them to run it so openly. Security theater works best when everyone sees it.
If I was organising security theatre, I'd probably ensure the (first? only?) person I targeted was a freelance journalist who'd accidentally acquired a million Twitter followers too...
Burn sources? That cat is already out of the bag. Everyone knows what's happening. I bet the leaks are incredibly liberating to intelligence. They no longer have to maintain the facade and can actually use their data to the full extent.
So we know that Federal (and State) law enforcement spends resources following up very tenuous leads.
Approximately 18 years ago I had 4 local police show up at my front door at 11:00 PM because my roommate had broken up with a girl and she told her parents that I posted her phone number on a Prodigy message board. I didn't do it and have never even had a Prodigy account.
I also barely knew the girl and she was only doing it to get back at my roommate through me.
I was in bed when they knocked on the door, I went downstairs and didn't let them in. They threatened everything short of killing me, I told them I had no idea what they were talking about. They then grilled my roommate outside for about 20 minutes. Dumbest situation I've ever been involved in.
So yeah, local cops have way to much time on their hands.
The story is gaining traction via the Guardian [1] and Atlantic Wire [2]. That's not vindication, but it does offer an additional layer of fact checking.
The Atlantic Wire piece points out that while the FBI "was aware of the visit...it was conducted by local police on Long Island".
I do not believe that the Atlantic Wire did any fact checking at all. The Atlantic Wire is The Atlantic's in-house HuffPo operation.
The Guardian apparently discovered that County PD visited Catalano's house. That's all we know, despite the fact that The Guardian ran a headline that said that Google searches produced a visit.
Tptacek, when we have our government admitting that it's established a global complete electronic dragnet why are you surprised that it will be used?
I do not really understand HN's skepticism in reaction to this story. The surveillance apparatus is real, well funded and the large number of people employed by it take their jobs very seriously.
I think there's more to it simply on the basis that sending three SUV's with at least six agents to investigate people would be almost impossible from an economic standpoint. That is extremely costly and time-consuming, not to mention the amount of lead-time required to brief agents and investigate this family. If they did that for every suspicious search query combination, they'd be awfully busy.
I don't even doubt that their family was paid a visit by agents. However I wouldn't be surprised if certain details were left out to sell a certain angle on this story. For example, to create a headline-worthy story she might have gone to unreasonable lengths to create the illusion of suspicious activity without actually doing anything illegal.
Edit:
I checked the Atlantic Wire story and was immediately turned-off by the photo. It is meant to mislead the reader into thinking the subjects are members of the family being described in the story. However if you scroll to the end you see in grayed-out type:
Photo: Massachusetts police search a home after the Boston bombings.
News these days is a complete joke. Anybody who thinks this is real journalism should go read Ryan Holiday's Confessions of a Media Manipulator. It's impossible to read or watch most news sources without a conscious level of skepticism.
Not sure about the financial side, the US government has a massive amount of resources to work with. The cost of employing 500 agents would be a fraction of the cost of say, a single military helicopter.
To say nothing of the bureaucratic fun that occurs when the US government is forced to work with itself in a JTTF-type situation.
1. Departments are territorial and image conscious (most being headed by elected officials or political appointees).
2. Individuals don't get promoted by passing up chances to work on those sorts of investigations. Even if they're nonsense.
If the feds want to check something out in a joint investigation situation, I can easily see 'federal agents want to have a talk' becoming 2 feds + 2 state/county + 2 local detectives.
There's a world of difference between "using it" and sending agents out to chase down leads that are statistically worthless. You can believe that they have and are otherwise using such a system while simultaneously rejecting the idea that they'd be wasting time and resources in this way.
Until the Snowden episode, sending agents to track down leads that were statistically worthless was worse than just a waste of resources, because the problem US they're actually trying to solve is "how do we monitor suspects whilst managing not to give away how much we know to journo-bloggers so passionate about their right to freedom of speech they might publicly question why the government is scrutinizing their search terms".[1]
The intersection of "pressure cooker", "backpack" and visits to overseas countries not known for sponsoring low-level terrorism is perhaps not the most obvious criterion for identifying terrorists, so presumably they'd also have to flag most of the ~12,000 people who searched for "bomb-making" last month, for example, and perhaps some more innocuous ones like independent searches for "martyr" and "white house" or "chechnya" and "aeroplane". That's a lot of resource.
Now even if they're pretty selective about who they actually pay a visit to, they're going to return a lot of false positives. No big deal, except that pre-Snowden the programme is supposed to be a secret and even within the subset of people flagging the "possible terrorist" alert they're going to investigate far more journalists (common occupation) than terrorists (rare occupation). Which is a bit of a problem if their modus operandi is instructing police to knock on people's doors and ask them whether they were searching for X on the internet. Was this really PRISM's raison d'etre?
The alternate hypothesis involves a freelance writer famous solely for her number of Twitter followers embellishing her police enquiry story with some very topical themes.
[1]If I worked in intelligence I'd solve that problem by not telling local cops what potential suspects had been doing on the internet...
The stated policy under the Bush Administration is that if there was even a 1% chance that a lead might be legitimate, then the government should pursue it with all available resources.
The use of resources shows that we're serious - so yeah, they waste them. Profligately. Or haven't you flown recently?
Strictly speaking it's been the FBI doing the surveillance itself and turning the data over for storage to NSA, if I understand the org. structure correctly.
The original WaPo/Guardian articles on PRISM are a good start, and I think one of the followup NYT articles was even more specific about how the NSA manages to capture information from domestic providers even though they're legally not allowed to intercept domestically.
Instead they have FBI install data collection devices, have the FBI runs NSLs/warrants as needed, etc. NSA just does the spook work after all that is done.
How is it OK that the local PD (acting as part of DoJ's Joint Terrorism Task Force) knows any factors that would reasonably lead them to investigate this family?
Except the Atlantic Wire article states that both the FBI and the JTTF denied visiting the house.
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 raid, 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."
I believe in the literal truth of those statements.
I do not believe it to be likely that the local PD had evidence that would warrant a raid that they obtained on their own through normal local police procedures.
I agree with sensible skepticism and reserving judgment to wait for more facts.[0]
tptacek, on the other hand, led with "I don't buy this, at all", and "if you're trying to sell a hoax", and many more sentences and comments that attack the author and the story.
([0]: The real life complication is that in most cases you will never get all the facts, and so reserving judgment forever ends up being the worst kind of inaction.)
So you still "don't buy this, at all"? Despite a credible news organization's confirmation that the FBI was aware of a local PD's visit to this family?
What makes my mind boggle is that idea that people would rely on a single blog post to assume the conclusion that the FBI is dragnetting Google searches for lead generation for suspicionless searches.
Who said it was suspicionless? That's just the author's assertion. They could have been targeted for some other reason (the frequent overseas travel for example) and then the searches came up when they were already being targeted.
Yes that does make it better. If the FBI are calling around to people, purely based on google searches that's terrible. If they are calling around to people based on a whole pile of other things that might be suspicious that's much better.
We know that the local police visited her house, and that the FBI knew about it.
I don't think I'm being unreasonable in trusting the author that the officers said they were with the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which is one of a few plausible ways the FBI would know about local PD activity.
Her credibility on the big fact is established. What are we missing, then? The details on what the questions were? Whether or not they were asked about their Google history? Where the intel came from?
For all we know, the FBI knew about it because so many people called them up to ask about it that they figured they'd call the local PD and ask them about it.
I don't think I'm being unreasonable in trusting the author that the officers said they were with the Joint Terrorism Task Force
“They were officers from the Nassau County Police Department who identified themselves as such,”
You might, justifiably, be suspicious of the police account. But all we have to go on are two contradicting accounts. Why not wait until we have some actual evidence?
The Guardian quote is incredibly weaselly (when ellipses appear in a quote it's a good sign that liberties are being taken). The same person stated that no one from the JTTF visited her house in any capacity, which includes police involved in the same.
So thus far -- assuming that the police aren't lying -- we've gone from terrorism task force visit caused by Google searches (that they do "100s of", apparently), to maybe, possibly, some local police visited her for some reason.
Your whole assumption is based on the fact that they want to find terrorists when I would put forward that their mission is actually to grow the institutional power. Budget share, it's what drives DC.
I'm sure there's a bunch of non-falsifiable fuzzy arguments you could substitute for this one. How about, "you assume they're looking for terrorists, but really they just don't like the texture of pressure-braised chicken."
I'm really having no problem seeing the situation as portrayed unfolding in a large bureaucracy.
1) Some dude adds pressure cooker to the dumb keywords list that's never found a valid lead, right after the only incidence in history of a pressure cooker being used as an implement of irregular warfare. (Reactive, CYA, ineffective, typical)
2) Whether they send out FBI trucks to people who came up on the filters: I agree that it's stupid. But that doesn't mean they wouldn't do it. How does "Investigated 46,000 terror leads last year" sound on the executive report?
It's not a matter of 'how could they be so smart and so dumb at the same time'. It's different people being smart and dumb.
Eh maybe so. But I've was raised in DC and worked for government many times and my family is in the intelligence industry so it's my own conclusion. I bet many in DC would agree with me.
When I type in "pressure cooker", the very first suggested Google query is "pressure cooker bomb"...which means a non-significant number of people have either searched for that query or have written about it.
And this is the first dramatic account we've heard of this? We've heard of several National Security Letters, the disclosure of which is breaking the law...yet none of the presumably hundreds and thousands of people who have been visited by government black SUVs have not made a quip about being erroneously searched? Even though such searches, as the OP describes it, are mostly non-confrontational and end with the agents being non-threatening?
Yeah, I also have to express some skepticism here.
I got the same impression after reading the post and before looking at the HN discussion. Good to see I wasn't the only one.
Initially I was horrified by the blog post because we now know for certain that google search histories are readily available without warrant to certain subsets of NSA analysts. Then it hit me that the blog post content and timing was too perfect. If such an uproarious event happened to the author, why on earth hold on to the story for "a few weeks"?
Who knows, maybe the author's husband did get searched and she's only assuming it was related to interest in pressure cookers and backpacks. I have no real reason to assume the author is lying, but I also don't have to assume she's telling the whole truth and not just trying to attract page views.
You're calling her a liar based on her second hand account of what JTTF (not FBI) agents told her husband. But the Google searches might have been only one element of what led the agents to go knocking on her door. We know for a fact that the feds do get people's Google searches after they've convinced some rubber stamp court that someone is suspicious.
I have no trouble believing that the FBI would do things that would compromise the fact that they collect information about searches for targets of investigations. That's a very different compromise than the one that reveals they dragnet all Google searches for lead generation.
"
Update, 7:05 p.m.: Because the Googling happened at work.
The Suffolk County Police Department released a statement this evening that answers the great mystery of the day.
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.
"
Can you tell me more about the author's credibility?
(She could be the US National Security Advisor and I still would not buy the idea that the FBI is simultaneously (a) dragnetting Google search teams and (b) noisily following up on suspicious ones; if the FBI is watching Google, they sure as fuck don't want you to know that.)
She's a writer who's been published in Forbes and BoingBoing, and has almost a million Twitter followers. So not a random nobody. Doesn't mean she has specialized knowledge in this area, and it _could_ be an experiment to see how fast a story would grow...
I've never heard of her except to remember that she wrote that Boing Boing piece on finding a million followers. And before you say, "Well how the fuck do you know every writer in existence?"...I'd say that I read way more than I should :) But I also do work in media, an industry which obsesses way too much about Twitter.
To make some comparisons...the OP's twitter account has 980,000 followers and rising.
Xeni Jardin, who is as household of a blogger name in the tech circles as one can get, has 77,000 followers
Cory Doctorow has 300,000.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has 1,339,448 followers
----
So am not arguing against the OP's credibility, per se, but just pointing out that having 1,000,000 twitter followers and yet not being a well-known name probably means that the followers didn't come because of the writer's credibility and fame. She may be great at Twitter, however.
Oh, so she's a professional attention-seeker, low-effort blogger, and Twitter spammer. That certainly helps me adjust my posterior probability estimate of her legitimacy.
I still would not buy the idea that the FBI is simultaneously (a) dragnetting Google search teams and (b) noisily following up on suspicious ones
The article doesn't really provide evidence for that. The family might have gotten the visit and they might have previously searched for terms the author thinks look suspicious to FBI. This proves nothing - the causal link looks like a typical hindsight mistake.
The visit might as well be a result of some kind of dumb screwup on the part of the forces. It's not like they never kick out the wrong front door or arrest the wrong person. We'll probably never know.
Edit, to clear my point: I have no problem believing the events described in the article but the causal relation is author's speculation and probably wrong.
While, I agree this COULD all be a sham story for someone who may be a bit of an attention seeker ... I would like to counter your arguments anyways to show that this story is actually perfectly believable.
In the article, the 'Task Force' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Terrorism_Task_Force) probably has a set of "Tasks" that they must accomplish to be ... well ... worth being a department with a budget. And I imagine one of those is following up on "profile-perfect" households or individuals.
So what would make this household 'profile-perfect'? Well it is true that there were searches for Pressure cookers and backpacks but that alone won't mean much due to the massive amounts of searches for these products.
But BOTH searches were done; and yet still I have to agree that the intersection still does not provide an un-biased view.
However, what if we take into consideration the timescale at which these searches (and possible purchases) took place? We know that the searches were made WITHIN the same week. This factor could possibly give us stronger signals for a profile-match.
Now what if we couple that with 'international travel'(e.g. how often a passport was used in a system for out-of-country travel)? The profile match would become higher due to the husbands business trips.
And I don't know where these people live, but location could also be a factor as well (e.g. the closer you live to a major city the greater your risk potential factor).
Now the cross-section for these factors would have such precision that doing a dragnet on this profile-match set would be feasible. And I imagine it would amount to less than 100 households a week (although I think if the story is true that the agent said this just to 'console' the family that this is common practice and there is nothing to worry about).
What do you guys think?
EDIT: Also not to mention that another factor could be 'Copy-cat-syndrome'(made up the term) e.g. how many things were occurring at this household to make them appear like potential Boston-bomber copycats?
You're not engaging with my point. Manpower and expense is a problem with this story, yes, but not the main problem; the main problem is that it's a strategy that is practically guaranteed to betray the existence of a whole new domestic Internet surveillance program while at the same time being almost mathematically guaranteed never to find a single terrorist.
She's inferring that her searches are the cause. It's not clear that the agents ever explicitly stated that they used search history to profile the family. They asked, "Have you ever looked up pressure cooker bombs?" They might ask this question of everyone.
No, you think you have, but because you don't understand the base rate theorem you're just talking past me. It's not enough to filter the population down to 100 households. Nothing you do with a filter changes the base rate of terrorist plots, which is extremely low. Profile 100 households, you get 100 false positives. Profile 50 households, you get 50 false positives. The likelihood of any one house you investigate housing an actual plot is always going to be very, very low.
I don't think I could facepalm any harder. What you are basically stipulating is that because pursuing certain leads could be almost always wrong that this would prevent a government department from following up on them? Are you kidding me?
Nothing you do with a filter changes the base rate of terrorist plots, which is extremely low.
In that case, I imagine the base rate of 'post-successful terrorist act plotting' is higher than 'pre-successful terrorist act plotting,' which would eliminate your argument.
Also, what you would be studying is the TYPE of terrorist activity not total plot numbers e.g. the stages of activity. If a successful terrorist attack was pulled off not to long ago in the past then that would call for an increase in the base rate of the TYPE of plotting. More terrorists would be more invigorated to pursue/look into similar methods as their next plot.
Maybe the cross-section of the plotting-type-pivot is what you could match against?
The simplest way to express my facepalm is: you are tremendously oversimplifying things.
Surely any increase in wannabe-copycat terrorists Googling for items used in recent terrorist attacks would be more than cancelled out by a much larger proportional increase in the much larger group of people that follow the news and don't want to be terrorists also Googling for items used in recent attacks
Filtering to target at high-risk sub-groups - which, among themselves, have different base rates than the general population- is entirely effective.
It is precisely the reasoning under which medical screening - ineffective, generally, due to the base rate - is aimed at, say, "Men Over 50", where the base rate grows sufficiently large to make screening worthwhile.
What trouble do you have with the fact that there aren't 100 terrorist plots in NYC? There might not even be 2 of them. If they're filtering down to 100 visits a week, something close to 99% of the visits are false positives.
tptacek seems hell-bent on not giving the side for which he has no factual data any mindshare at all--there are arguments for that mindset.
As for your filtering observation, yeah, I have no idea if he just mis-stated his position, is using different definitions, or today just can't into math.
One of two possibilities arise from this comment. The first is that you think that there might be many many terrorist plots ongoing at any time. The other is that you don't understand the simple idea of a base rate and how it applies to statistical filters.
It's unfortunate, because that article and the base rate article have some contradictory conclusions--but, the linked article shows its math.
What's really troubling me here though is that you seem unwilling even as a thought experiment to entertain the notion that this sort of behavior could be purposeful by the government. In many, many prior discussions you've held this view, you've advocated for stripping rights, you've advocated for screwing over people scraping public unauthenticated APIs, you've advocated a great many things against the general notion of the public good, of privacy, and of exploration.
Perhaps come down here and--in the name of intellectual honesty--try and understand what exactly has so many of these people bothered. As it is, due to your choice of message and presentation, you often come off as at best aloof and at worst willfully ignorant.
I like how this comment goes from acknowledging that the author didn't know about an extremely basic and fundamental concept of statistics to a whole paragraph of (frankly weird) assertions about my character and beliefs. It's almost gymnastic.
I think one place to start moving forward is to acknowledge that you really have no idea what I do or don't believe.
How would you stack this against the Guardian article that was quoted further down the page?
A spokesman for the FBI told to the Guardian on Thursday that its investigators were not involved in the visit, but that "she was visited by Nassau County police department … They were working in conjunction with Suffolk County police department."
You're suggesting that the FBI always does the optimal thing. This may not be the case. To put it mildly. I refer you to Hanlon's razor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
Surveillance of Google search terms wouldn't be revealed unless someone told the suspects directly (which these bumbling police officers essentially did).
It is entirely plausible that searches for "pressure cookers" and backpacks are some of several factors used to flag suspects. There is almost certainly a mandate to prevent pressure cooker bombings. I would guess they allotted some resource budget to that task and then simply created search criteria that narrowed the set of cases into one that could be investigated using those resources. I am pretty certain they didn't make any calculations of posterior probabilities.
There aren't nearly enough samples to make any kind of meaningful statistical assessment of efficacy, even if you believed that that was the primary decision making tool of the security agencies.
Assuming the story is true the NSA or FBI probably flagged these individuals using a number of factors (search terms, "anti-government" writing, etc) but not enough to merit use of limited federal resources. Still they hit on several risk factors so local police are informed, they may have additional information about these people and have boots on the ground to keep on eye on them (if something did happen then NSA and FBI could wash their hands: "We told the local police, they did nothing"). The comparatively unsophisticated local police, partly motivated by the same fear of being responsible if something did happen, then ham-fisted the investigation.
First: On your assertion that federal government agencies (or agencies that work in tandem with them) act in line with mathematical probability like the base rate theorem and that they necessarily allocate resources in a cost-effective manner.
Has a federal agency ever been funded to the tune of 8 billion dollars a year, infringed on individual freedoms, harassed innocent civilians, all of which are tangible wastes and violations while based on a premise that also completely ignores the base rate theorem? Has such an agency been scrapped even though they have failed to negate the base rate theorem after billions of resources invested and negative collateral effects?
Second: On your point that revealing their methods in this case "burns a source" How is this burning a source?
1. As others have provided citations for, the FBI has already revealed that they surveil communications.
2. One would assume that competent terrorists are not in complete ignorance of the possibility that the FBI utilizes a domestic surveillance system. Thus, the "secret source" does not really provide the element of surprise.
3. If by burning you mean revealing to the masses and compromising public opinion, the federal government of the US has already shown that they believe in the checks and balances of their system (such as warrants, blanket or otherwise) and this is one of their major defenses of these practices. If they wholeheartedly believe that the system is legal (as they have demonstrated), then they would not feel the need to hide this kind of investigation.
Regardless of whether the story is true or not (I haven't made up my mind on this yet), I don't think the arguments you give for discrediting the story seem as strong as you present them.
Yep, doesn't stop NYPD from stopping and frisking random minorities (including a 3 star NYPD police chief who was not very happy about having guns pulled on him while sitting in his NYPD vehicle with a badge around his neck). Looks like this was local cops, never underestimate the desire of a cowboy to be a hero.
I was unable to find the reference where Ms Catalano claimed to be visited directly by FBI agents as you are suggesting in your posts, and not as she said (https://medium.com/something-like-falling/2e7d13e54724) the Joint Terrorism Task force, which includes local law enforcement members who are part of it and who work together with the FBI and other agencies. JTTF is generally overseen and investigation coordinated by the FBI, and the FBI also pays the participating agencies expenses for costs incurred during their JTTF work.
(http://www.fbi.gov/page2/dec04/jttf120114.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Terrorism_Task_Force)
Searching the article which is linked to and which you are commenting about reveals that it does not even include the term "FBI". However that is hardly relevant given then connection to the FBI that the JTTF has, members are generally acting on behalf of FBI investigations when they do JTTF work. If someone were to call them de facto FBI agents it would not be inaccurate given they act with the authority of the FBI and are paid by the FBI for their work on the JTTF.
Please state clearly whether you are asserting that Ms Catalano's article here contains lies in your opinion, and clarify exactly what she said that you believe she is lying about or misrepresenting. Please provide a reference quote to the part of the referenced article that you are commenting on where she makes a claim to be visited by FBI agents specifically and not the JTTF.
This story doesn't mention the FBI at all, man. It mentions six plainclothes guys in three black SUVs who've obviously had some tactical training, and leaves it at that.
The point being that America has become a country where six armed guys can show up at your door with pointed questions and no warrant, and you will never be told why.
Your skepticism turns out to be warranted. Apparently the operation was conducted after local police "received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee."
It was implied in the story that the husband was looking up how to create a pressure cooker bomb as well out of curiosity. Even that might not be enough though. If FBI are smart they just classify each user into brackets of suspicious activity. The top N% get investigated, where N depends on the current available resource/budget. Not hard to believe at all.
100 visits a week, which regardless of your filter has a Bayesian assurance of a huge false positive rate, each of which has a (say) single-digit percentage chance of revealing a highly confidential intelligence source. No. Not plausible.
This was exactly my impression reading this. I fully expect -- if the author wants to regain any credibility -- that the author will say that it was a fiction "based on real events" of where society will be if the NSA moves ahead, etc (which goes along with the fact that they categorized it under "thoughts into essays". Read the other entries so categorized). That it was but an enlightened warning.
Comments
Many, many thousands of pressure cookers are sold every year. Terrorist attacks are extremely rare. Millions and millions of backpacks are sold every year. The intersection of those two products isn't helpful. The base rate theorem dictates that pressure cooker sales will turn out to be a very poor signal for terrorism.
This article posits (or is trying to sell you on the idea) that the FBI watches for pressure cooker sales on the Internet and dispatches teams of extremely expensive FBI agents to investigate them. Stipulate that the FBI has access to that information (I don't think they do, but whatever). What the FBI isn't going to do is compromise sources and methods in a pressure cooker dragnet. They are mathematically assured not to find terrorists that way. But they'd make a huge amount of noise. They don't burn sources for no good reason.
I don't buy this, at all.
Also not helpful, if you're trying to sell a hoax: the too-vivid callbacks to the Boston bombers, and to the FBI's television show image.
Later
Note also that this story wants you to infer that the FBI told her husband that they were following up on Internet search leads. Not only did they roll trucks to a residence to do a search that was almost mathematically guaranteed to come up blank, but when they did that, they hinted around at the secret program that got them to do it.
TFA: "They asked my husband about his work, his visits to South Korea and China"
I'd say the NSAs '3 steps' policy is far more likely. The husband interacts with someone overseas who interacts with someone else who is on a list somewhere. [1] The NSA does the routine profile on everyone within three steps of the-guy-on-the-list, some key words generate hits, salaried agents get another address to visit.
That possibility doesn't get hung up on the problematic notion that anyone's setting up such visits based on google searches alone, nor implies a JTTF agent caughed up real information on how they actually got their lead or why they were actually there.
[1] If you're doing business on the Chinese mainland, it seems pretty likely you'll be within three steps of 'potential terrorists', given the whole cyber cold war and economic espionage thing.
I was disappointed that it took her 14 paragraphs to get to this. She starts "I was buying a pressure cooker and my husband was looking at backpacks" when she should have started "my husband makes frequent trips to China and Korea ..." Less frenzy that way I guess.
when she should have started "my husband makes frequent trips to China and Korea
Why is that? China is our second largest trading partner. Korea is our 7th. Is visiting countries that we do massive amounts of trade with suspicious?
Mentioning the connection to foreign business casually, once, while spending the bulk of the 'story' hyping some implication that the government is profiling people based on web searches alone shows a tabloid-leaning lack of respect for the reader.
The writer's burying what should be a relevant example of "why even innocent people shouldn't like this NSA spying/profiling" (which we know to exist and know has policies that could likely result in their visit from the JTTF) under a largely-implausible theory (that has no substantiating evidence from any whistleblower or leak to date, nor does it present any) that ultimately serves no purpose but self-promotion.
(It looks like an attempt to make her experience the center of it's own story, as opposed to a contributing piece of the larger Snowden/NSA story.)
Truth and accuracy aside, why would her experience not be the center piece? I think the personal experience of 'everyday citizens' is enormously important in understanding issues of privacy and (self-)censorship.
In fact, highlighting the consequences for 'regular people' arguably contributes more to that understanding than the zillionth story about 'exceptions' like Assange/Snowden/RandomIranianBlogger. In the end those are (seen as) edge-cases.
Hackernews and other websites latching on to the 'technical' part of the story is understandable, but whether it was the quinoa or the pressure cooker or her husband's business dealings isn't the real subject of this story - the real insight provided by this story is the fact that she was left in a state of distress, leading to her questioning her every day communications/searches...
Which is what I said. "The writer's burying what should be a relevant example of "why even innocent people shouldn't like this NSA spying/profiling""
Her experience should be the center of her article. I'm talking about her pushing a silly theory that the NSA is doing a web search dragnet in an attempt to make her article the center of a fork from the larger story of NSA spying. And as the theory is generally silly, it simply distracts and detracts from the root NSA spying story, instead of reinforcing it and adding a direct human/emotional anchor for it.
The policy is not the issue. It's relevant to the story and she buried it to make her story fit a narrative.
Buried it? It's plain as day in her own story. Your characterization as "14 paragraphs" sure is dishonest considering the size of her "paragraphs" that are broken up only to make it more readable. Sure, it's not the headline but nor should it be. It's irrelevant if he travels to China or Korea. China and Korea are not equivalent to Afghanistan or Nigeria. And frankly even travel to those places shouldn't warrant a warrantless parade of police into your house.
Thousands if not millions of people make business visits to Asia - South Korea, Japan, China - every year. How it can be otherwise if most high-tech equipment used in the US is produced there? Are you saying it is completely normal for them to get a visit from the police and get questioned about their kitchen inventory, nothing out of the ordinary here?
"Potential terrorist" is a very vague term. Anybody who is alive and not brain-dead can be "potential terrorist". However I don't see how you explain the police asking questions about pressure cookers. Is that just a common thing - anybody that visits China gets a visit from the police that ask them if they make a pressure cooker bombs, just in case? Like the routine "How are you, sir? Is everything alright? How was your China trip? Did you make any pressure cooker bombs today? How about tomorrow? Good day to you, sir, then!".
"The NSA does the routine profile on everyone within three steps of the-guy-on-the-list, some key words generate hits, salaried agents get another address to visit."
By routine profile, I meant "of the data we all already know the NSA has access to, such as google search history/mail content/etc".
e.g. they may have been on an 'automated search' list for being at three-degrees-of-'terrorist'-kevin-bacon and then got on a 'physical visit' list for trips to china + a few keyword hits in the web activity logs. at which point it seems obvious they would ask about pressure cooker bombs, even though they weren't there just because someone had searched online for pressure cooker bombs.
Now, I'm certainly not defending the NSAs list-making justifications nor accuracy. The whole thing is bullshit.
But this story looks like a textbook use of the bullshit programs we (now/all) know about. And it gives us no reason to theorize the existence of some new (trivially unsustainable, useless) program.
Pressure cooker seems to be very specific topic. There are a real lot of ways to make bombs. Yet more to cause general havoc - terrorism doesn't have to be just with explosives. Yet the questioning, as reported, was very focused - which raises the suspicion that it was related to the other piece of information that was focused on the same topic.
As for if they got it from "old" or "new" NSA programs - I don't think anybody really cares at this stage. What one would care is if his next google search would lead to a 3am SWAT visit with flashbang grenades or just a friendly visit from a bunch of armed guys in SUVs. That's the worrying part, not the name of the program the government uses to make it happen.
Of course it's focused: they almost certainly used their web traffic to pre-screen.
We already know from the slides that they do searches of their ill-gotten web traffic against a laundry list of keywords. Probably, every single remotely terrorist-sounding keyword.
I'd imagine "Ruby Ridge" and "fertilizer bomb" and "jihad" are in there as well. But the agents only need to mention "pressure cooker bombs" because that's what they'd actually gotten hits on.
The question is whether it makes more sense for this visit to have been the result of google alone (unlikely-to-implausible) or was the result of being pre-targetted for other reasons, which then brought their web activity under scrutiny (which fits everything we already know about the NSA's processes and policies and the facts in this case).
Off topic: if Kevin Bacon ended up on a list of suspected terrorists....
Remember when the Secret Service visited the 13-year old boy at his school regarding a Facebook post? http://abclocal.go.com/kfsn/story?section=news/national_worl...
What about Justin Carter, a 19-year old recently freed on $500,000 bail for another Facebook post?
So we know that Federal (and State) law enforcement spends resources following up very tenuous leads.
As far as burning sources and methods, what else would you have them do to follow up on this specific lead? Six agents interviewing someone for an hour seems less expensive than weeks or months of surveillance.
What does it matter if the account is true or false? It's completely plausible.
You're not following. Yes, Bayes says that following up on stupid Facebook posts is also a waste of time. But the cost of following up on Facebook posts is low; nobody is surprised that the FBI finds out about stupid threats you post to Facebook, because Facebook is essentially public. The cost of following up on a Google dragnet is very high; the whole artifice of the Internet surveillance program is that it's not used this way.
Note that I'm not saying that Internet surveillance data doesn't get used this way. I'm saying that when it does, the USG sure as shit doesn't advertise the fact. They don't burn sources and methods for no good reason.
It's almost totally implausible.
Why is this even a debate about expense? Even if it cost the government $0 to store data on all americans and send agents to search peoples homes and question them it would not make it right for them to do it.
This is a basic question of what freedoms individuals have. If you make the laws so complicated and or secretive that no one can comply with them then the entire system fails. You have 3 letter agencies running around selectively enforcing overly complex/secret laws then the very foundation of what the law is meant to do breaks. Selective enforcement equals political influence equals the Rule of Men, not the Rule of Law.
>Why is this even a debate about expense?
Because the thread of this conversation is plausibility, and the OP article lacks a great deal of that, as pointed out by tptacek. Nobody here is arguing that this surveillance is correct, only that the sequence of events in the story makes no damn sense.
What artifice? Edward Snowden has removed the need for the government to pretend that kind of thing isn't done.
No, he didn't. That's an Internet meme, not a revealed truth. The USG may very well be abusing SIGINT to profile the whole US population, but it is not true that they're doing that openly.
Didn't the NSA just admit the existence of XKEYSCORE in a press release? [1] They pretty much verified much of what the Guardian had reported, while denying widespread, unchecked analyst access to data. And this blog post reveals a "foreignness factor" which would justify the search.
1. http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2013/30_July_2013....
Oh, "internet memes," such pesky things! Why, every time there's a new Chuck Norris joke there are congressional hearings and amendments being debated! Such trouble! And remember that last time someone posted a cute cat video, and congresspeople made statements left and right (some of them even validating what the cat video said)?
My my, what trouble those "internet memes" get us into.
You sure did a lot there to avoid refuting his point (and avoid saying anything substantial, I might add). His point is that the actual abuse hasn't been documented, and they surely wouldn't do it in such a silly way as this article suggests if they were abusing it in this manner.
I was annoyed at the condescension of "internet meme", and was commenting on that.
When the clear potential for abuse has been thoroughly documented, getting nitpicky on actual abuse seems like a waste of time.
Of course, were I to get nitpicky, I'd say there is documented evidence of abuse (with NYTimes reporting going back years): http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130731/16193324027/nsa-bo...
--
EDIT: I do believe there's a difference between the potential for abuse and actual abuse. But I further believe the potential for abuse from global surveillance is so significant that even the potential is a dire problem in its own right. I was a bit too flippant about that distinction above.
You're overestimating the competence of government.
No, I'm not.
Incidentally, I love the mentality that says that the USG is using optical splitters to record all the traffic on the Internet, built a data center sufficient to archive it, built the database technology sufficient to enable the entire NSA and FBI realtime access to that data, compromised SSL CAs, but is too dumb not to tell strangers about their secret programs on random visits.
It's like in the movies, when the evil mastermind has the hero tied to a chair suspended over the laser shark tank, but monologues long enough for the hero to find a way to escape.
Apparently at least one FBI counterterrorism agent did this very thing, on national television. I think you are seriously underestimating FBI agents' big mouths.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/tim-clemente-fbi_n_...
http://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/going-dark-lawful-electron...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/28/fbi-surveillance_n_...
Edit: Note that this was well before the PRISM leaks.
The group of people that are doing this random visits are not imbued in the same culture of secrecy as the NSA. Furthermore, the larger a program, the more and more casual a group of people are going to be about protecting it. It's the fault of our social programming -- if nearly everyone I deal with on a daily basis is in on a secret, I am far more likely to share that secret. This is probably the reason that nobody talks about their own secret projects at the NSA.
Your line of reasoning was what I used to assume about the type of NSA style data collection: "Gathering and using data information about every American would be an immense task, requiring lots of people -- if such a program existed, we probably would have found out about it now."
It turns out -- we are finding out about it for precisely that reason.
You're picturing the organization as a single mind and mentality when it's composed of many thousands of people with many motivations and levels of competence. The agents on the ground aren't the same as those who build the fancy technology (and in this case the agents who visited the author of the blog post were from a completely different organization).
This is how spying works in general--find one of the inevitably many people in a secret organization who will, in the right compromised situation (alcohol, a romantic affair, etc.), brag about their knowledge of state secrets.
Or look at Bradley Manning, who among other things exposed the fact that low level operatives have access to far more secret data than one would have imagined. His motivation (which led him to release all the data) differed from the organization's overall motivation in an extreme way.
The FBI confirmed the officers who paid a visit were county police, not FBI agents: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-police...
Which makes me wonder, how do county police get access to a reporter's search history?
They probably got the tap on the shoulder…
Believe what you wish. Your mind is already made.
That's because the data has already been seen. (Did you expect "You're overestimating the competence of government" to change anyone's mind?)
I love the mentality that says that the USG is [doing complicated technical things], but is too dumb not to tell strangers about their secret programs on random visits.
That's not a mentality, that's being aware the USG consists of millions of people, exactly the opposite of
It's like in the movies, when the evil mastermind has the hero tied to a chair
Thomas, the sane HN readers have stopped venturing into the NSA threads. You've made a valiant effort, and its charitable of you to keep the truthers distracted from attacking other threads, but it's time to leave them behind.
The cops in question were apparently local members of a Joint Terrorism Task Force. They get these tips from "the government", check them out, the people are once again not terrorists, and they then talk to them freely like normal people, because (1) they are and (2) the cops aren't NSA, don't have training in this kind of secrecy and don't care, and (3) do pretty well by classifying people into sheep and goats without worrying that some of the sheep might be cleverly disguised goats or have goat friends.
So yeah, this part of the story is entirely plausible to me.
Not to pick on you, but this meme is so grating to read over and over. "Government is incompetent" is an easy, lazy narrative that distracts from the immense complexity that is government (especially the US government).
Government is neither competent nor incompetent. It is a vast collection of organizations composed of humans that vary from grossly negligent paycheck collectors to shockingly effective strategic geniuses. Bureaucracy is the friction inherent in the system; different people clog and lubricate its workings to different aims, which range from the purest altruism to the most cynical abuse.
A government may be incompetent in solving issues in the interest of their constituents, but these people are cream-of-the-crop professionals at accumulating power.
This does seem implausible and I understand why. This program couldn't last more than a couple weeks, right?
But 2 things, neither of which are solid, can't rule it out (for me): if all search engines are monitored, what does it matter if the sources and methods are revealed? The adversary won't have much use for that information, unless they stop using the Internet altogether. It's a dumb argument, sure, but I could see it used as justification.
Second: does FBI leadership think a program like this could have prevented Boston? If they think this program is a good idea, I would not put it past them to run it so openly. Security theater works best when everyone sees it.
If I was organising security theatre, I'd probably ensure the (first? only?) person I targeted was a freelance journalist who'd accidentally acquired a million Twitter followers too...
Burn sources? That cat is already out of the bag. Everyone knows what's happening. I bet the leaks are incredibly liberating to intelligence. They no longer have to maintain the facade and can actually use their data to the full extent.
So we know that Federal (and State) law enforcement spends resources following up very tenuous leads.
Approximately 18 years ago I had 4 local police show up at my front door at 11:00 PM because my roommate had broken up with a girl and she told her parents that I posted her phone number on a Prodigy message board. I didn't do it and have never even had a Prodigy account.
I also barely knew the girl and she was only doing it to get back at my roommate through me.
I was in bed when they knocked on the door, I went downstairs and didn't let them in. They threatened everything short of killing me, I told them I had no idea what they were talking about. They then grilled my roommate outside for about 20 minutes. Dumbest situation I've ever been involved in.
So yeah, local cops have way to much time on their hands.
What does it matter if the account is true or false?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
The story is gaining traction via the Guardian [1] and Atlantic Wire [2]. That's not vindication, but it does offer an additional layer of fact checking.
The Atlantic Wire piece points out that while the FBI "was aware of the visit...it was conducted by local police on Long Island".
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-police...
[2] http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/government-k...
I do not believe that the Atlantic Wire did any fact checking at all. The Atlantic Wire is The Atlantic's in-house HuffPo operation.
The Guardian apparently discovered that County PD visited Catalano's house. That's all we know, despite the fact that The Guardian ran a headline that said that Google searches produced a visit.
Seriously? How could anybody doubt that their journalists would perform due-diligence?
These are their most-clicked stories this hour:
Google 'Pressure Cookers' and 'Backpacks,' Get a Visit from the Cops
So, You Want to Hide from the NSA? Your Guide to the Nearly Impossible
The World's Most Homoerotic Homophobes Are Now Mounting a Giant Pole in Tiny Pink Shorts
Fox News Is Rushing to Defend Its Reza Aslan Interview
China Owes U.S. Movie Studios At Least $120 Million
For a Split GOP, 2016 Can't Come Soon Enough
Taylor Swift Knows a Secret
Welcome to the Homeland, Mexico and Canada!
Don't Say Hillary Clinton Is Running for President
Netflix Has Made It Easier Than Ever to Share Accounts
Tptacek, when we have our government admitting that it's established a global complete electronic dragnet why are you surprised that it will be used?
I do not really understand HN's skepticism in reaction to this story. The surveillance apparatus is real, well funded and the large number of people employed by it take their jobs very seriously.
I think there's more to it simply on the basis that sending three SUV's with at least six agents to investigate people would be almost impossible from an economic standpoint. That is extremely costly and time-consuming, not to mention the amount of lead-time required to brief agents and investigate this family. If they did that for every suspicious search query combination, they'd be awfully busy.
I don't even doubt that their family was paid a visit by agents. However I wouldn't be surprised if certain details were left out to sell a certain angle on this story. For example, to create a headline-worthy story she might have gone to unreasonable lengths to create the illusion of suspicious activity without actually doing anything illegal.
Edit:
I checked the Atlantic Wire story and was immediately turned-off by the photo. It is meant to mislead the reader into thinking the subjects are members of the family being described in the story. However if you scroll to the end you see in grayed-out type:
Photo: Massachusetts police search a home after the Boston bombings.
News these days is a complete joke. Anybody who thinks this is real journalism should go read Ryan Holiday's Confessions of a Media Manipulator. It's impossible to read or watch most news sources without a conscious level of skepticism.
Not sure about the financial side, the US government has a massive amount of resources to work with. The cost of employing 500 agents would be a fraction of the cost of say, a single military helicopter.
To say nothing of the bureaucratic fun that occurs when the US government is forced to work with itself in a JTTF-type situation.
1. Departments are territorial and image conscious (most being headed by elected officials or political appointees).
2. Individuals don't get promoted by passing up chances to work on those sorts of investigations. Even if they're nonsense.
If the feds want to check something out in a joint investigation situation, I can easily see 'federal agents want to have a talk' becoming 2 feds + 2 state/county + 2 local detectives.
There's a world of difference between "using it" and sending agents out to chase down leads that are statistically worthless. You can believe that they have and are otherwise using such a system while simultaneously rejecting the idea that they'd be wasting time and resources in this way.
Until the Snowden episode, sending agents to track down leads that were statistically worthless was worse than just a waste of resources, because the problem US they're actually trying to solve is "how do we monitor suspects whilst managing not to give away how much we know to journo-bloggers so passionate about their right to freedom of speech they might publicly question why the government is scrutinizing their search terms".[1]
The intersection of "pressure cooker", "backpack" and visits to overseas countries not known for sponsoring low-level terrorism is perhaps not the most obvious criterion for identifying terrorists, so presumably they'd also have to flag most of the ~12,000 people who searched for "bomb-making" last month, for example, and perhaps some more innocuous ones like independent searches for "martyr" and "white house" or "chechnya" and "aeroplane". That's a lot of resource.
Now even if they're pretty selective about who they actually pay a visit to, they're going to return a lot of false positives. No big deal, except that pre-Snowden the programme is supposed to be a secret and even within the subset of people flagging the "possible terrorist" alert they're going to investigate far more journalists (common occupation) than terrorists (rare occupation). Which is a bit of a problem if their modus operandi is instructing police to knock on people's doors and ask them whether they were searching for X on the internet. Was this really PRISM's raison d'etre?
The alternate hypothesis involves a freelance writer famous solely for her number of Twitter followers embellishing her police enquiry story with some very topical themes.
[1]If I worked in intelligence I'd solve that problem by not telling local cops what potential suspects had been doing on the internet...
The stated policy under the Bush Administration is that if there was even a 1% chance that a lead might be legitimate, then the government should pursue it with all available resources.
The use of resources shows that we're serious - so yeah, they waste them. Profligately. Or haven't you flown recently?
I'm not necessarily describing his thought process, but here's how I see it.
The bigger and more important something is, the more rigor, care and 'cool' should be applied to it.
A big part of me is just screaming about all of this crap. But it's important to settle down, and apply even more reason and rigor.
Be cool; stay focused; think about the problem; work the problem.
Isn’t it the NSA who does the mass-surveillance? Why whould they share their findings with e.g. the FBI?
Strictly speaking it's been the FBI doing the surveillance itself and turning the data over for storage to NSA, if I understand the org. structure correctly.
I must admit I haven’t read the articles about Snowden’s discloures that close. Do you have any links to share regarding the FBI:s involvement?
The original WaPo/Guardian articles on PRISM are a good start, and I think one of the followup NYT articles was even more specific about how the NSA manages to capture information from domestic providers even though they're legally not allowed to intercept domestically.
Instead they have FBI install data collection devices, have the FBI runs NSLs/warrants as needed, etc. NSA just does the spook work after all that is done.
Thanks. Ever since I read Clifford Stoll’s ”The Cuckoo’s Egg” I’ve been under the impression that the NSA and the FBI hated each other :)
Well that pretty much was the case, right up until 9/11. ;)
That's your backtrack? That we don't know enough?
How is it OK that the local PD (acting as part of DoJ's Joint Terrorism Task Force) knows any factors that would reasonably lead them to investigate this family?
Except the Atlantic Wire article states that both the FBI and the JTTF denied visiting the house.
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 raid, 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."
I believe in the literal truth of those statements.
I do not believe it to be likely that the local PD had evidence that would warrant a raid that they obtained on their own through normal local police procedures.
What's the reconciliation?
No, we don't know enough. What we know is that something here looks odd, and that warrants more investigation.
Perhaps this particular person was already under investigation for something else. We don't know.
I want to know more, but I'm reserving my outrage until more facts and confirmation come out.
I agree with sensible skepticism and reserving judgment to wait for more facts.[0]
tptacek, on the other hand, led with "I don't buy this, at all", and "if you're trying to sell a hoax", and many more sentences and comments that attack the author and the story.
([0]: The real life complication is that in most cases you will never get all the facts, and so reserving judgment forever ends up being the worst kind of inaction.)
I haven't backtracked an inch.
So you still "don't buy this, at all"? Despite a credible news organization's confirmation that the FBI was aware of a local PD's visit to this family?
The mind boggles.
What makes my mind boggle is that idea that people would rely on a single blog post to assume the conclusion that the FBI is dragnetting Google searches for lead generation for suspicionless searches.
No, wait, that doesn't boggle my mind at all.
Who said it was suspicionless? That's just the author's assertion. They could have been targeted for some other reason (the frequent overseas travel for example) and then the searches came up when they were already being targeted.
Does that make it better?
Yes that does make it better. If the FBI are calling around to people, purely based on google searches that's terrible. If they are calling around to people based on a whole pile of other things that might be suspicious that's much better.
Tptacek, it's called clustering and outlier detection. Look it up before you make a complete fool of yourself.
dyinglobster, it's called the Bayesian Base Rate Fallacy, and you just fell for it.
It's called common sense.
NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec1...
All we know is that the local police visited her house. That is the entirety of what has been confirmed by The Guardian.
There is absolutely nothing with waiting for definitive evidence before making your mind up about something.
We know that the local police visited her house, and that the FBI knew about it.
I don't think I'm being unreasonable in trusting the author that the officers said they were with the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which is one of a few plausible ways the FBI would know about local PD activity.
Her credibility on the big fact is established. What are we missing, then? The details on what the questions were? Whether or not they were asked about their Google history? Where the intel came from?
For all we know, the FBI knew about it because so many people called them up to ask about it that they figured they'd call the local PD and ask them about it.
I don't think I'm being unreasonable in trusting the author that the officers said they were with the Joint Terrorism Task Force
From this WaPo article http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/01... :
“They were officers from the Nassau County Police Department who identified themselves as such,”
You might, justifiably, be suspicious of the police account. But all we have to go on are two contradicting accounts. Why not wait until we have some actual evidence?
The Guardian quote is incredibly weaselly (when ellipses appear in a quote it's a good sign that liberties are being taken). The same person stated that no one from the JTTF visited her house in any capacity, which includes police involved in the same.
So thus far -- assuming that the police aren't lying -- we've gone from terrorism task force visit caused by Google searches (that they do "100s of", apparently), to maybe, possibly, some local police visited her for some reason.
"assuming that the police aren't lying "
Unfortunately, this is an awfully huge assumption to make!
Sounds an awful lot like: http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times-art...
Your whole assumption is based on the fact that they want to find terrorists when I would put forward that their mission is actually to grow the institutional power. Budget share, it's what drives DC.
I'm sure there's a bunch of non-falsifiable fuzzy arguments you could substitute for this one. How about, "you assume they're looking for terrorists, but really they just don't like the texture of pressure-braised chicken."
I'm really having no problem seeing the situation as portrayed unfolding in a large bureaucracy.
1) Some dude adds pressure cooker to the dumb keywords list that's never found a valid lead, right after the only incidence in history of a pressure cooker being used as an implement of irregular warfare. (Reactive, CYA, ineffective, typical)
2) Whether they send out FBI trucks to people who came up on the filters: I agree that it's stupid. But that doesn't mean they wouldn't do it. How does "Investigated 46,000 terror leads last year" sound on the executive report?
It's not a matter of 'how could they be so smart and so dumb at the same time'. It's different people being smart and dumb.
Eh maybe so. But I've was raised in DC and worked for government many times and my family is in the intelligence industry so it's my own conclusion. I bet many in DC would agree with me.
Nope, sounds stupid to me and my neighbors were NSA agents.
Okay then. I appreciate your input.
I'm sure your neighbors told you all about the work they do at the NSA.
Never said they did. Looks like you should brush up on your reading comprehension.
Strictly speaking, he never claimed you did.
When I type in "pressure cooker", the very first suggested Google query is "pressure cooker bomb"...which means a non-significant number of people have either searched for that query or have written about it.
And this is the first dramatic account we've heard of this? We've heard of several National Security Letters, the disclosure of which is breaking the law...yet none of the presumably hundreds and thousands of people who have been visited by government black SUVs have not made a quip about being erroneously searched? Even though such searches, as the OP describes it, are mostly non-confrontational and end with the agents being non-threatening?
Yeah, I also have to express some skepticism here.
I got the same impression after reading the post and before looking at the HN discussion. Good to see I wasn't the only one.
Initially I was horrified by the blog post because we now know for certain that google search histories are readily available without warrant to certain subsets of NSA analysts. Then it hit me that the blog post content and timing was too perfect. If such an uproarious event happened to the author, why on earth hold on to the story for "a few weeks"?
Who knows, maybe the author's husband did get searched and she's only assuming it was related to interest in pressure cookers and backpacks. I have no real reason to assume the author is lying, but I also don't have to assume she's telling the whole truth and not just trying to attract page views.
The author said this happened Wednesday (yesterday). The "few weeks ago" was when she searched for pressure cookers and imagined alerts going out.
Good catch. My bad. Apparently my reading comprehension skills aren't as strong as I like to think.
You're calling her a liar based on her second hand account of what JTTF (not FBI) agents told her husband. But the Google searches might have been only one element of what led the agents to go knocking on her door. We know for a fact that the feds do get people's Google searches after they've convinced some rubber stamp court that someone is suspicious.
I have no trouble believing that the FBI would do things that would compromise the fact that they collect information about searches for targets of investigations. That's a very different compromise than the one that reveals they dragnet all Google searches for lead generation.
Per an update via the The Atlantic Wire:
" Update, 7:05 p.m.: Because the Googling happened at work.
The Suffolk County Police Department released a statement this evening that answers the great mystery of the day.
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. "
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/government-k...
I agree that I'd like to see some actual evidence. The author _is_ someone with a degree of credibility, but it is a little hard to believe.
That said, I posted this specifically because I thought the discussion around exactly this would be interesting.
Can you tell me more about the author's credibility?
(She could be the US National Security Advisor and I still would not buy the idea that the FBI is simultaneously (a) dragnetting Google search teams and (b) noisily following up on suspicious ones; if the FBI is watching Google, they sure as fuck don't want you to know that.)
She's a writer who's been published in Forbes and BoingBoing, and has almost a million Twitter followers. So not a random nobody. Doesn't mean she has specialized knowledge in this area, and it _could_ be an experiment to see how fast a story would grow...
However, she is only Twitter famous, due to a self-acknowledged quirk in Twitter's system:
http://boingboing.net/2013/01/18/fickle.html
I've never heard of her except to remember that she wrote that Boing Boing piece on finding a million followers. And before you say, "Well how the fuck do you know every writer in existence?"...I'd say that I read way more than I should :) But I also do work in media, an industry which obsesses way too much about Twitter.
To make some comparisons...the OP's twitter account has 980,000 followers and rising.
Xeni Jardin, who is as household of a blogger name in the tech circles as one can get, has 77,000 followers
Cory Doctorow has 300,000.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has 1,339,448 followers
----
So am not arguing against the OP's credibility, per se, but just pointing out that having 1,000,000 twitter followers and yet not being a well-known name probably means that the followers didn't come because of the writer's credibility and fame. She may be great at Twitter, however.
Ahhh, interesting. Yes, absolutely, it's only a signal, not proof of relevance.
Oh, so she's a professional attention-seeker, low-effort blogger, and Twitter spammer. That certainly helps me adjust my posterior probability estimate of her legitimacy.
The article doesn't really provide evidence for that. The family might have gotten the visit and they might have previously searched for terms the author thinks look suspicious to FBI. This proves nothing - the causal link looks like a typical hindsight mistake.
The visit might as well be a result of some kind of dumb screwup on the part of the forces. It's not like they never kick out the wrong front door or arrest the wrong person. We'll probably never know.
Edit, to clear my point: I have no problem believing the events described in the article but the causal relation is author's speculation and probably wrong.
The apologist begins to sputter.
Why are you so surprised? Mass surveillance isn't happening for no reason.
While, I agree this COULD all be a sham story for someone who may be a bit of an attention seeker ... I would like to counter your arguments anyways to show that this story is actually perfectly believable.
In the article, the 'Task Force' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Terrorism_Task_Force) probably has a set of "Tasks" that they must accomplish to be ... well ... worth being a department with a budget. And I imagine one of those is following up on "profile-perfect" households or individuals.
So what would make this household 'profile-perfect'? Well it is true that there were searches for Pressure cookers and backpacks but that alone won't mean much due to the massive amounts of searches for these products.
But BOTH searches were done; and yet still I have to agree that the intersection still does not provide an un-biased view.
However, what if we take into consideration the timescale at which these searches (and possible purchases) took place? We know that the searches were made WITHIN the same week. This factor could possibly give us stronger signals for a profile-match.
Now what if we couple that with 'international travel'(e.g. how often a passport was used in a system for out-of-country travel)? The profile match would become higher due to the husbands business trips.
And I don't know where these people live, but location could also be a factor as well (e.g. the closer you live to a major city the greater your risk potential factor).
Now the cross-section for these factors would have such precision that doing a dragnet on this profile-match set would be feasible. And I imagine it would amount to less than 100 households a week (although I think if the story is true that the agent said this just to 'console' the family that this is common practice and there is nothing to worry about).
What do you guys think?
EDIT: Also not to mention that another factor could be 'Copy-cat-syndrome'(made up the term) e.g. how many things were occurring at this household to make them appear like potential Boston-bomber copycats?
You're not engaging with my point. Manpower and expense is a problem with this story, yes, but not the main problem; the main problem is that it's a strategy that is practically guaranteed to betray the existence of a whole new domestic Internet surveillance program while at the same time being almost mathematically guaranteed never to find a single terrorist.
She's inferring that her searches are the cause. It's not clear that the agents ever explicitly stated that they used search history to profile the family. They asked, "Have you ever looked up pressure cooker bombs?" They might ask this question of everyone.
Someone posted this below which I find hilarious.
"Section Chief: You dispatched field agents without understanding the base rate theorem!? You're a loose cannon, McGillicutty...
McGillicutty: ...I get results!
Section Chief: Mathematically, you shouldn't. Ergo, you don't."
Actually I addressed both the Financial and Mathematical points of your initial comment quite avidly/thoroughly.
No, you think you have, but because you don't understand the base rate theorem you're just talking past me. It's not enough to filter the population down to 100 households. Nothing you do with a filter changes the base rate of terrorist plots, which is extremely low. Profile 100 households, you get 100 false positives. Profile 50 households, you get 50 false positives. The likelihood of any one house you investigate housing an actual plot is always going to be very, very low.
I don't think I could facepalm any harder. What you are basically stipulating is that because pursuing certain leads could be almost always wrong that this would prevent a government department from following up on them? Are you kidding me?
In that case, I imagine the base rate of 'post-successful terrorist act plotting' is higher than 'pre-successful terrorist act plotting,' which would eliminate your argument.
Also, what you would be studying is the TYPE of terrorist activity not total plot numbers e.g. the stages of activity. If a successful terrorist attack was pulled off not to long ago in the past then that would call for an increase in the base rate of the TYPE of plotting. More terrorists would be more invigorated to pursue/look into similar methods as their next plot.
Maybe the cross-section of the plotting-type-pivot is what you could match against?
The simplest way to express my facepalm is: you are tremendously oversimplifying things.
Surely any increase in wannabe-copycat terrorists Googling for items used in recent terrorist attacks would be more than cancelled out by a much larger proportional increase in the much larger group of people that follow the news and don't want to be terrorists also Googling for items used in recent attacks
Section Chief: You dispatched field agents without understanding the base rate theorem!? You're a loose cannon, McGillicutty...
McGillicutty: ...I get results!
Section Chief: Mathematically, you shouldn't. Ergo, you don't.
I do not think so.
Filtering to target at high-risk sub-groups - which, among themselves, have different base rates than the general population- is entirely effective.
It is precisely the reasoning under which medical screening - ineffective, generally, due to the base rate - is aimed at, say, "Men Over 50", where the base rate grows sufficiently large to make screening worthwhile.
What trouble do you have with the fact that there aren't 100 terrorist plots in NYC? There might not even be 2 of them. If they're filtering down to 100 visits a week, something close to 99% of the visits are false positives.
tptacek seems hell-bent on not giving the side for which he has no factual data any mindshare at all--there are arguments for that mindset.
As for your filtering observation, yeah, I have no idea if he just mis-stated his position, is using different definitions, or today just can't into math.
One of two possibilities arise from this comment. The first is that you think that there might be many many terrorist plots ongoing at any time. The other is that you don't understand the simple idea of a base rate and how it applies to statistical filters.
So, your first possibility is incorrect.
The second is worth investigating, and in the interest of teaching others I'll provide a helpful link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
It's unfortunate, because that article and the base rate article have some contradictory conclusions--but, the linked article shows its math.
What's really troubling me here though is that you seem unwilling even as a thought experiment to entertain the notion that this sort of behavior could be purposeful by the government. In many, many prior discussions you've held this view, you've advocated for stripping rights, you've advocated for screwing over people scraping public unauthenticated APIs, you've advocated a great many things against the general notion of the public good, of privacy, and of exploration.
Perhaps come down here and--in the name of intellectual honesty--try and understand what exactly has so many of these people bothered. As it is, due to your choice of message and presentation, you often come off as at best aloof and at worst willfully ignorant.
I like how this comment goes from acknowledging that the author didn't know about an extremely basic and fundamental concept of statistics to a whole paragraph of (frankly weird) assertions about my character and beliefs. It's almost gymnastic.
I think one place to start moving forward is to acknowledge that you really have no idea what I do or don't believe.
How would you stack this against the Guardian article that was quoted further down the page?
A spokesman for the FBI told to the Guardian on Thursday that its investigators were not involved in the visit, but that "she was visited by Nassau County police department … They were working in conjunction with Suffolk County police department."
You're suggesting that the FBI always does the optimal thing. This may not be the case. To put it mildly. I refer you to Hanlon's razor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
Surveillance of Google search terms wouldn't be revealed unless someone told the suspects directly (which these bumbling police officers essentially did).
It is entirely plausible that searches for "pressure cookers" and backpacks are some of several factors used to flag suspects. There is almost certainly a mandate to prevent pressure cooker bombings. I would guess they allotted some resource budget to that task and then simply created search criteria that narrowed the set of cases into one that could be investigated using those resources. I am pretty certain they didn't make any calculations of posterior probabilities. There aren't nearly enough samples to make any kind of meaningful statistical assessment of efficacy, even if you believed that that was the primary decision making tool of the security agencies.
Assuming the story is true the NSA or FBI probably flagged these individuals using a number of factors (search terms, "anti-government" writing, etc) but not enough to merit use of limited federal resources. Still they hit on several risk factors so local police are informed, they may have additional information about these people and have boots on the ground to keep on eye on them (if something did happen then NSA and FBI could wash their hands: "We told the local police, they did nothing"). The comparatively unsophisticated local police, partly motivated by the same fear of being responsible if something did happen, then ham-fisted the investigation.
Agree on plausibility. Also, don't forget the 20-year-old son. Bet they checked the medicine cabinet.
First: On your assertion that federal government agencies (or agencies that work in tandem with them) act in line with mathematical probability like the base rate theorem and that they necessarily allocate resources in a cost-effective manner.
Has a federal agency ever been funded to the tune of 8 billion dollars a year, infringed on individual freedoms, harassed innocent civilians, all of which are tangible wastes and violations while based on a premise that also completely ignores the base rate theorem? Has such an agency been scrapped even though they have failed to negate the base rate theorem after billions of resources invested and negative collateral effects?
Second: On your point that revealing their methods in this case "burns a source" How is this burning a source?
1. As others have provided citations for, the FBI has already revealed that they surveil communications.
2. One would assume that competent terrorists are not in complete ignorance of the possibility that the FBI utilizes a domestic surveillance system. Thus, the "secret source" does not really provide the element of surprise.
3. If by burning you mean revealing to the masses and compromising public opinion, the federal government of the US has already shown that they believe in the checks and balances of their system (such as warrants, blanket or otherwise) and this is one of their major defenses of these practices. If they wholeheartedly believe that the system is legal (as they have demonstrated), then they would not feel the need to hide this kind of investigation.
Regardless of whether the story is true or not (I haven't made up my mind on this yet), I don't think the arguments you give for discrediting the story seem as strong as you present them.
Yep, doesn't stop NYPD from stopping and frisking random minorities (including a 3 star NYPD police chief who was not very happy about having guns pulled on him while sitting in his NYPD vehicle with a badge around his neck). Looks like this was local cops, never underestimate the desire of a cowboy to be a hero.
My takeaway from this article is that it was a piece of realistic fiction, not reported as fact and thus not a "hoax".
The author, Michele Catalano lists herself as a political writer not a news reporter.
http://michelecat.wordpress.com/about/
Edit: I take it all back, she claims on her twitter that this is accurate and true. I share your reservations on the veracity of this account.
I was unable to find the reference where Ms Catalano claimed to be visited directly by FBI agents as you are suggesting in your posts, and not as she said (https://medium.com/something-like-falling/2e7d13e54724) the Joint Terrorism Task force, which includes local law enforcement members who are part of it and who work together with the FBI and other agencies. JTTF is generally overseen and investigation coordinated by the FBI, and the FBI also pays the participating agencies expenses for costs incurred during their JTTF work. (http://www.fbi.gov/page2/dec04/jttf120114.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Terrorism_Task_Force)
Searching the article which is linked to and which you are commenting about reveals that it does not even include the term "FBI". However that is hardly relevant given then connection to the FBI that the JTTF has, members are generally acting on behalf of FBI investigations when they do JTTF work. If someone were to call them de facto FBI agents it would not be inaccurate given they act with the authority of the FBI and are paid by the FBI for their work on the JTTF.
Please state clearly whether you are asserting that Ms Catalano's article here contains lies in your opinion, and clarify exactly what she said that you believe she is lying about or misrepresenting. Please provide a reference quote to the part of the referenced article that you are commenting on where she makes a claim to be visited by FBI agents specifically and not the JTTF.
Her twitter: https://twitter.com/inthefade
States: "Pro tip: don't do a search for pressure cookers right after your spouse does a search for backpacks if you don't want the FBI at your door."
Before later clarifying: "To clarify, they turned out to be a terrorist task force, not FBI. I wasn't home, my husband and son were."
This story doesn't mention the FBI at all, man. It mentions six plainclothes guys in three black SUVs who've obviously had some tactical training, and leaves it at that.
The point being that America has become a country where six armed guys can show up at your door with pointed questions and no warrant, and you will never be told why.
Your skepticism turns out to be warranted. Apparently the operation was conducted after local police "received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee."
http://gothamist.com/2013/08/01/li_woman_says_she_was_invest...
It was implied in the story that the husband was looking up how to create a pressure cooker bomb as well out of curiosity. Even that might not be enough though. If FBI are smart they just classify each user into brackets of suspicious activity. The top N% get investigated, where N depends on the current available resource/budget. Not hard to believe at all.
[deleted]
100 visits a week, which regardless of your filter has a Bayesian assurance of a huge false positive rate, each of which has a (say) single-digit percentage chance of revealing a highly confidential intelligence source. No. Not plausible.
FWIW looks like you were right: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6146898
This was exactly my impression reading this. I fully expect -- if the author wants to regain any credibility -- that the author will say that it was a fiction "based on real events" of where society will be if the NSA moves ahead, etc (which goes along with the fact that they categorized it under "thoughts into essays". Read the other entries so categorized). That it was but an enlightened warning.