As Barack Obama defends the Prism program which taps into the data of large tech companies like Apple, Google, Skype Verizon and others, what he cannot defend is the appearance of six members of a joint task force showing up on a couple's doorstep because they innocently searched for items they needed in their households.
Meet Michele Catalano, who needed a pressure cooker and her husband who, unbeknownst to her, was Googling backpacks, and a 20 year-old news junkie of a son who followed the Boston Marathon Bombing story, as almost every other American was doing at the time.
These searches and clicking of story links, ended up being looked at by someone who then put their name onto some type of potential terrorist list, and resulted in six agents from the joint terrorism task force knocking on their door.
In Michele's own words from her blog:
At about 9:00 am, my husband, who happened to be home yesterday, was sitting in the living room with our two dogs when he heard a couple of cars pull up outside. He looked out the window and saw three black SUVs in front of our house; two at the curb in front and one pulled up behind my husband’s Jeep in the driveway, as if to block him from leaving.
Six gentleman in casual clothes emerged from the vehicles and spread out as they walked toward the house, two toward the backyard on one side, two on the other side, two toward the front door.
A million things went through my husband’s head. None of which were right. He walked outside and the men greeted him by flashing badges. He could see they all had guns holstered in their waistbands.
“Are you [name redacted]?” one asked while glancing at a clipboard. He affirmed that was indeed him, and was asked if they could come in. Sure, he said.
They asked if they could search the house, though it turned out to be just a cursory search. They walked around the living room, studied the books on the shelf (nope, no bomb making books, no Anarchist Cookbook), looked at all our pictures, glanced into our bedroom, pet our dogs. They asked if they could go in my son’s bedroom but when my husband said my son was sleeping in there, they let it be.
Meanwhile, they were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live.
Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked.
They searched the backyard. They walked around the garage, as much as one could walk around a garage strewn with yardworking equipment and various junk. They went back in the house and asked more questions.
Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? My husband, ever the oppositional kind, asked them if they themselves weren’t curious as to how a pressure cooker bomb works, if they ever looked it up. Two of them admitted they did.
By this point they had realized they were not dealing with terrorists. They asked my husband about his work, his visits to South Korea and China. The tone was conversational.
They never asked to see the computers on which the searches were done. They never opened a drawer or a cabinet. They left two rooms unsearched. I guess we didn’t fit the exact profile they were looking for so they were just going through the motions.
Michele ends her post with "I’m scared. And not of the right things."
The agents admitted to Michele's husband they do this about 100 times a week. And that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing.
The bottom line here is they are watching every single thing we are doing online.