There can't be many people that have at least searched for the anarchists cookbook at some time. The notion that the authorities now think it's ok to turn up at my doorstep for that is incredible. The language used is pretty chilling as well, apparently just searching for "bomb" is now an "incident". I'm also aware that I now have a little voice questioning whether or not I should post this comment...
Cue the massive avalanche of 'I told you so' from all of the smart people on HN who were arguing that there was no way this was NSA related yesterday.
I read this on my phone last night and was convinced it would have already been submitted to HN by the time I got to work. Sad to say I was wrong, but I'm glad someone mentioned it.<p>Here we have another win for tptacek in the "common sense and reason" column.
The bigger point is that the general public is starting to get worked up about this stuff - I could see lots of people retelling the "can you believe you can't google pressure cookers anymore?" story. Even though the NSA isn't related here people are starting to assume the worst. Hopefully this will start to make the general public more upset which is only way to ultimately change anything.
Here's the HN thread when the story was first posted: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140545" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140545</a>. Its fun/important to go back and do a little autopsy about the way things played out.
Ok, so, what IS the point of PRISM (or any other service monitoring Google or whatever company) then?<p>Do you have to search something like "I want to _____ (insert terrorist action) on _______ (insert date) at ______ (location)" in order to actually trigger something?
Well it wasn't a PRISM program or anything, simply a company monitoring internal internet usage. This I understand and makes sense, although I don't think it warranted a call to police...<p>My company does the same thing, turns out one of the managers had been downloading porn onto their computer for months and the first time we installed it we noticed. When we checked out his computer he had over 200 Gb of the stuff... so yeah, he was fired, clearly he wasn't doing his job to the best of his performance.
I hate to be this guy, but knowing this [1] and this [2] and this [3], I think that news release from Suffolk Police is not sufficient enough. I mean there are bigger scandals full of lies coming from official officials, how can I be assured local Suffolk Police tells the truth?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130611/11122823408/senator-wyden-calls-hearings-over-intelligence-officials-lying-to-congress.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130611/11122823408/senato...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/obama-syria-congress_b_3540921.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/obama-syria-cong...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/07/02/national-intelligence-director-apologizes-for-lying-to-congress" rel="nofollow">http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/07/02/national-inte...</a>