Re:Traffic to Wikipedia terrorism entries plunged after Snow...
by throwanem on Thursday April 28, 2016 @10:13AM
(#11588979)
It is dishonest to represent this as an instance of "the search engine police" turning up as a result of NSA snooping. From the NY Daily News article you linked:
>“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.
>“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.
[1] http://www.wired.com/2013/08/pressure-cooker/