Police Visit Home After ‘Pressure Cooker’ Googles

A blog post by a Long Island woman went viral after she wrote that members of the “joint terrorism task force” came to her home because she’d been Googling “pressure cookers” and her husband had been browsing backpacks online. It turns out the officials were members of the Suffolk County police department, and they’d been alerted not by the NSA’s X Keyscore program but by a tip from the woman’s husband's employer, who had noticed searches for “pressure cookers.” Still disconcerting, but more to do with snooping employers than all-seeing surveillance states.

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Massive NSA Web Surveillance Program Revealed

There may have been truth to Edward Snowden’s controversial claim that he said he could “wiretap anyone” if he had their email address. The Guardian has revealed a training guide for a program called XKeyscore, which NSA documents call the agency’s “widest-reaching” system for gathering Internet information. The program monitors everything anyone does on the Internet, from the content of emails to websites visited, searches, chats, and metadata. It can also be used to watch real-time Internet activity. The quantity of data collected is so huge—1 billion to 2 billion records a day—that they can only be stored for several days, with more “interesting” data saved for longer. Though an NSA worker would need a warrant to target a U.S. citizen, the agency can collect data on any citizen in communication with someone on foreign soil without a warrant.

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