Police Squad Raids Home in N.Y. for Mother Searching for "Pressure Cooker" online for Quinoa

Newsflash from your Hollywood Attorney:

Take a woman’s love for steamed Quinoa, her husband’s appetite for a backpack plus a dash of her son’s love of current events and you have the perfect recipe for a police raid. 

That’s what allegedly happened to Michele Catalano, who lives in Long Island, New York. Catalano said her web searches for pressure cookers, coupled with her husband’s search for a rucksack and her son’s insatiable interest in the Boston bombings turned into what she believed was a "perfect storm of terrorism profiling."

Catalano, a professional writer described the police search in an article on Medium.com. Her initial suspicion that her family’s Google searches were being monitored proved unfounded after the story had already gone viral, when the police revealed in a statement they had been acting on a tip from a local employer who noticed the search history on a work computer.

“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,’” the statement read.

“After interviewing the company representatives, Suffolk County Police Detectives visited the subject’s home to ask about the Internet searches. The incident was investigated by Suffolk county Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Detectives and was determined to be non-criminal in nature.”

Catalano’s fears were based, at least in part, on the information disclosed in the leaks from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Snowden’s disclosures revealed the existence of the PRISM and Tempora web monitoring programs, which allows the US government to access American’s emails, chat logs, and other Internet activity in the same of protecting national security.

She described the fear her husband felt when he saw six casually dressed men step out of the three sports utility vehicles that pulled up in front of the family’s home.

“A million things went through my husband’s head,” she wrote. “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.”

While the agents made a cursory search through the residence, “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.”

The officers left 45 minutes later without incident, except to leave Catalano stunned and nervous. Near the end of their visit, after the police were sure Catalano’s husband did not pose a threat, they told him how frequently they search peoples’ homes.

“They mentioned that they do this about 100 times a week,” she said. “And 99 of those turn out to be nothing. I don’t know what happens on the other one per cent of visits and I’m not sure I want to know what my neighbors are up to.”

Source.... http://rt.com/usa/googling-bomb-feds-raid-suspicious-925/

http://lawofficesofjonathanfranklin.blogspot.com/

Law Offices of Jonathan Franklin
Open Evenings and Weekends this Summer
Call Us Now (310) 273-9600    
 http://www.jonathanfranklinlaw.com