[phire]

People are overthinking things.

The court filing says they seized his laptop and phone, and seems to suggest all this information came from examining those devices. The google searches were probably just sitting in his browser history.

Oh, and then the idiot went and bought another laptop the very next day, despite explicit military orders not to. His opsec skills seem to be lacking.

[miffy900]

This is probably exactly what happened. I bet he used Chrome as well. It doesn't really help that Google Chrome keeps history basically forever (on the order of months), even without signing into a Google Account.