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.
Comments
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...