Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which prompts the question: How’d the government know what they were Googling?
Note, this doesn’t seem to be a case of the NSA spying, but about a company freely cooperating to spy on their customers and then turn it whereby the federal agency then discards the Constitution.
But, no worries… I’m sure some celebrity will have another crisis and we can forget about this.
Actually it was a former employer who found some stuff on the computer someone in the family had used while working there.
Which seems fairly reasonable. It was their computer, after all. And it’s depressingly common for former employees to do violence to their former employers.
I suspect the suspect was in fact typing “pressure c…” into Google, and Google Instant automatically filled in the “b” word, because that is the most popular search, and did that search.
Search engines such as duckduckgo.com do not store IP addresses.