Be wary of what you Google; agents in the joint terrorism task force are allegedly watching your searches, and a Long Island woman says her experiences can prove it.
According to Michele Catalano's personal blog entitled "Medium," six agents from the joint terrorism task force to knock on her Wednesday morning. She claims she was researching pressure cookers while her husband was online look for a backpack, and their searches lead to a "perfect storm of terrorism profiling."
"Somewhere out there, someone was watching," Catalano wrote. "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."
The agents allegedly asked if they could search the couple's home, skipping only their son's room because Catalano's husband told them he was sleeping.
According to the blog post, the agents were "peppering" her husband with questions like where he was from and where his parents lived. Catalano said they asked her the same questions.
"Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker," Catalano wrote. "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."
Catalano claims the searches dated back weeks, and did not understand why the agents "took so long" to visit their home.
"Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in "these times" now," Catalano wrote, referring to the Boston Bombings back in April putting everyone in high alert.
Since publishing the post, Catalano may have received backlash or criticism about the authenticity of her story. She wrote the following addendum on the blog:
"I did not lie or make it up. I wrote the piece with the information that was given. What was withheld from us obviously could not be a part of a story I wrote based on what happened yesterday. The piece I wrote was the story as we knew it with the information we were told. None of it was fabricated. If you know me, you know I would never do that."
Suffolk County Police released the following statement to The Washington Post about the incident:
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.
