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by ollysb 4363 days ago
It also makes you wonder what those "terrorists" had actually done to warrant being captured.
1 comments

Being stupid suckers for set up set pieces, or searching for pressure cooker based recipes for quinoa (not enough to be arrested, sorry, gitmo'ized, but enough to be questioned)[0].

[0] HN comments on "Pressure cookers, backpacks, and quinoa, oh my" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140545

EDIT: @csandreasen I did not mean to imply that the quinoa incident was NSA related, but to give an example of what could happen as we veer deeper and deeper into a culture of surveillance and assumption of bad faith. Criminalization of sarcasm is another thing that will happen / has happened.

The "surveillance state looking for pressure cooker searches" ended up being complete paranoia and shoddy journalism. Yes, a New York man was visited by the police and questioned by local police regarding his Google searches for "pressure cookers" and "backpacks". It turned out that it was not an Orwellian surveillance state that tracked him down, but rather that the local police were following up when his employer viewed its own network logs, became suspicious and alerted the authorities.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/08/02/michele_ca...