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Anti terror squad visit after she researched pressure cookers online

Anti-terror squad visit after she researched pressure cookers online

By Anupam Saxena | Updated: 2 August 2013 16:44 IST

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Michele Catalano, a music contributor at Forbes and freelance writer, posted a detailed account of how some search queries that included the term "pressure cooker" and "backpacks" led to six agents from the US Department of Justice Joint Terrorism Task Force visiting her.

In a blog post on Medium, Catalano mentions that six men in casual clothes visited her home and conducted a cursory search. They also investigated her husband checking his family background and asked him if the family owned any pressure cookers and whether he knew how to make a bomb using it and if he had searched the Internet looking for the instructions to make it.

Catalano feels that the visit somehow related to her Google search history. She recalls that she had once researched "pressure cookers" and during the same time her husband was looking to buy a backpack, while her son could have accessed material related to perhaps bomb making instructions linked by a news website, all at the same time. This could have been the trigger behind the Internet companies flagging the searches and reporting them to investigating agencies, following the Boston blasts that involved the use of pressure cooker bombs.

She does mention that the investigators never asked to see the computers on which the searches were done, and after finding out that the family did not fit into the profile they were looking for, left. The investigators told Catalano's husband that they do these kind of investigations about 100 times a week and "that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing."

However, it turns out that the entire incident has got nothing to do with the NSA tracking people's web history or Google sharing suspicious searches with the authorities. Instead, the company where Catalano's husband used to work tipped the Suffolk County Police Department as he searched "pressure cooker bombs" and "backpacks" on his work computers.

In a statement released to the public, the Suffolk County Police Department said

Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. The former employee's computer searches took place on this employee's workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms "pressure cooker bombs" and "backpacks."

After interviewing the company representatives, Suffolk County Police Detectives visited the subject's home to ask about the suspicious internet searches. The incident was investigated by Suffolk County Police Department's Criminal Intelligence Detectives and was determined to be non-criminal in nature.

Any further inquiries regarding this matter should be directed to the Suffolk County Police Department.

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