NEW YORK—A family was swarmed by law enforcement for items they were searching for on Google this past week.
Suffolk County Police Department, in New York showed up Wednesday (July 31) at 9 a.m outside of the Pinnell residence in three black SUVs greeting Todd Pinnell (who used to work as a product manager at Speco Technologies) with six plainclothes detectives from the joint terrorism task force.
Pinnell spoke about his infractions with the detectives stating:
Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling. Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. Someone whose job it is to piece together the things people do on the internet raised the red flag when they saw our search history.
This case was not a use of the newly-discovered NSA PRISM program in which high profile websites hand over or give complete access to user’s data…meaning Google didn’t turn over search data or red flag key searches, but in this case it ended up being that Todd Pinnell’s workplace was monitoring their company’s internet traffic.
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.
Source: Full story here
