>“Somewhere out there, someone was watching,” Michele Catalano wrote on the “Medium” blog[...]
> The Suffolk County Police Department said it sent detectives to her East Meadow home Wednesday after a Bay Shore-based computer company reported suspicious computer searches by a “recently released” employee.
> “We found out ... that the searches involved also things my husband looked up at his old job,” Catalano wrote Thursday night in a separate blog post on “Open Areas,” her personal site.
In sum: Mr. Catalano and his former employer got into a flap presumably related in some way to the employer becoming "former"; said employer, which sounds like a pretty lousy place to work if this is the kind of shit they pull, tried to SWAT the Catalanos in the best 4chan style; Mrs. Catalano, seeing an opportunity to grab some headlines and maybe a touch of lasting notoriety for her otherwise entirely forgettable online presence, made this out to be something almost entirely other than what it was; the post-Snowden online media grabbed hold of it for five minutes, then realized how they'd been played and turned on Mrs. Catalano [1] for thinking she could put one over on them.
I don't see how the case against ubiquitous Internet surveillance can be effectively bolstered with dishonest representations of rather trivial events.
>cops show up at multi-family house in blue collar neighborhood >guy in tank top chewing tobacco answers door >"can we step inside and discuss some stuff" >locks door, steps outside, closes door >"ain't nobody with a badge going in there without a warrant and after what happened to Jim who lives upstairs nobody around here talks to you people without a lawyer" >cops escalate situation >guy they're talking to does something that plays into their trap >police beat him senseless, taze him a few times, arrest him, wind up charging him with everything and then dropping everything except some circularly defined charge
And all that could easily happen to a middle class white guy. God forbid you're not white or Muslim...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/long-island-woman-c...
>Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in “these times” now.