Seen on the street in Kyiv.

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck, A/K/A Dolt-45,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset., A/K/A P01135809

Thursday, August 1, 2013

Google the "Wrong Things" and the Cops Will Show Up

In case you didn't believe that the Feds (or somebody) is watching everything you do online, consider this: A woman in suburban New York wanted to know how to cook lentils with a pressure cooker. Around the same time, her husband was trying to find a backpack. Both were doing this on the web.

The cops showed up to question them. And not just Sgt. Friday and Detective Gannon, no, six dudes in three SUVs showed up.

If you want to know about pressure cookers, go look at a cookbook in the library. If you want to see what's available, then go a kitchenware store. For if you try to research buying or using a pressure cooker online, the Feds will notice it. And they'll send some of the local thugs from the area "joint fascism terrorism task force" to have a rather intimidating chat with you.


You feeling safer, now?

8 comments:

Nangleator said...

The proper answer to every last one of their questions was, "None of your fucking business."

In a civilized country, you could give the proper answers to such people.

w3ski said...

Now, the Feebs deny it:
http://news.yahoo.com/-police-and-fbi-deny-alleged-search-of-new-york-home-stemming-from-journalist%E2%80%99s-web-searches--200309173.html
WTF?
w3ski

Comrade Misfit said...

But all they have to say is the magic word "terrorism" and you're in a police state. That is the reality of the "land of the pseudofree" nowadays.

Old NFO said...

Ummm... NO!

Comrade Misfit said...

w3ski, in the NY metro area, the JTTF probably has cops from a half-a-bazillion agencies and departments. And we know that Google and the other search engines have let the Feds tap in.

So is this plausible: Betcherass.

BadTux said...

My speculation, based on known information but going beyond it:

The FBI etc. have standard Google searches that they've "flagged" at Google HQ. Execute one of those searches, your identifiable information is used to plop you into a "suspicious" category that includes about 100 million Americans. Execute sufficient of those searches, your information bubbles up to the top of that pool of "suspicious" people and you get scheduled for a visit. There's a delay between the searches and the visit simply because a human being has to actually look at who has popped to the top of the pool and decide who *really* needs a personal hands-on visit... and there's some cases where they won't visit, but merely put you on a watch list to see who else you're involved with.

The main issue with this process is the sheer number of people it pops out as "suspicious". It takes human beings weeks to sort through the latest pile to see who's "really" suspicious. A former NSA operative of my acquaintance rolls his eyes and shakes his head and calls it looking for a raindrop in an ocean and a massive waste of time. His hypothesis is that the contractors are driving this show, the contractors want a piece of the Homeland Security pie and have fed the Feds a pile of BS about the usefulness of their technology. I'm not aware of anybody who has been captured based solely on the content of their Google queries, the terrorists we've caught thus far had clear connections to actual real live terrorists overseas, or were a buncha schmucks set up by a FBI informant after coming to the Feebs' attention due to doing something that brought them to local law enforcement's attention. I.e., they were caught by police work, not by this bullshit searching-for-a-raindrop-in-an-ocean crap, which is a massive violation of Americans' privacy for no good purpose.

- Badtux the Surveillance Penguin

Anonymous said...

Hate to burst the bubble, but they were both doing searches on their employers' computers and their employers narced them out.

Don't believe everything bad.

BadTux said...

So an employer he hasn't worked for since *MARCH* narced him out THIS WEEK?! I call shenanigans. Just sayin'.

Look, it's normal to look at employees' computers when they leave. I do it myself to see whether they were leaking any of our confidential information to the outside and retrieve any intellectual property (documents, usually) that may be there and stash them on our corporate file server. But you don't wait friggin' FOUR MONTHS to do it! For one thing, that computer's valuable, it needs to be re-imaged back to stock and put back into the pool for the departed employee's replacement to use...