We Can All Resume Googling Backpacks And Pressure Cookers (opens in new tab)

Did you even read the article? The whole point is that isn't what happened.

Edit: Misunderstood the parent's comments. Yes, this is what happened.

> The notion that the authorities now think it's ok to turn up at my doorstep for that is incredible.

But this has always been true. If your neighbor gets robbed, you're going to get a knock on your door to see if you saw anything. They could stop by and ask for a glass of lemonade. Who cares? You seem to imply that there was some intimidation, but I read nothing to indicate that.

Nobody was (or at least I wasn't) claiming 100% that this was the result of NSA spying. My big frustration was that in a matter of half an hour, 2 very viral denouncement posts appeared from honest-to-god journalists, basically belittling this woman's claims implying that she is an idiot, an attention whore or a hoaxer, without any additional facts or insights.

If anything it is a stark foreshadowing of how we will be shamed and mocked into the status quo not by our government but by our peers, eased into it like an old man gently lowering his body into an uncomfortably warm bath.

We already played this game yesterday evening:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6144294

This cueing could get real meta, real fast. :)

Point taken though.

Not completely. He was quick to link alternate explanations that made equally little sense but didn't make it the result of NSA data mining - such as a picture of fireworks posted on facebook causing it all, despite the fact they showed up asking about pressure cookers. He was fighting a wave of people who were 100% certain it was the NSA, but still...

'Common Sense and Reason' belongs only to those who read the story and waited to hear more before posting. But I'm biased. :-D

The general public will realize that these complaints are unfounded, because the most famous ones all turn our to be false, and starts trusting the government over the privact advocates. And maybe the general public is right... HN has gone from skeptic to full nutter over the NSA recently, accusing the NSA of doing excessively expensive and complicated secret projects for no benefit, not even their own benefit, and of ignoring cheap, easier, well-dcoumented, more obvious techniques to achieve the same results.

The point of PRISM is that if you already have a person of interest in mind, you can data mine within that persons's communications, likes, pages read, etc. to determine if he/she is actually being 'radicalized', or if they have connections to other people who are 'radicalized'.

From there you can determine "who's who in the zoo" of extremist cells for use in other intelligence collection schemes. E.g. if someone receives messages from known intermediaries of an AQ bomb makers and then 'drops off the grid' it may be a good time to step up to video/satellite surveillance.

Simply doing random searches isn't tracked by PRISM (though it might be from systems that use wiretap features). But even random searches like those are likely to simply be filtered out outright by the NSA, they are simply too common (even without pranksters who run the search thinking they're Sticking It to The Man) to be worth following up individually.

Even the NSA doesn't have infinite resources after all, and they are still dependent on other agencies for follow-up activities, and those other agencies are certainly more resource-constrained than NSA is.

When authorities make small claims that make common sense, they require less discretion.

Common sense indicates that this was not part of a dragnet of people searching pressure cookers and backpacks. If it was: where are the reports of the certainly dozens (hundreds/thousands?) of people who have made similar searches?

The home owner voluntarily agreed to a search. Not sure what the privacy violation was... unless you think internet searches on your employer's network falls within your domain of privacy?

What you do on your employer's computer on your employer's network isn't private. Maybe it should be, but we all know that it isn't. We may even have signed a form to that effect.