Admit it. Who among us hasn't googled 'pressure cooker bomb'? I know I have. Maybe not 'backpack', but I know I sure was curious how the hell you make a bomb using a pressure cooker after the Boston Marathon.
But I did it at home. Not at work.
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.”
I'd like to know what makes this search 'suspicious'. The fact that it has the words 'pressure cooker' and 'bomb' in them, combined with the fact that it was conducted on a work computer. Granted there are no rights to privacy on work computers but Catalano may have been fired for using his computer for personal use, not because he was a terrorist.
Michelle Catalano is sticking by her story, saying her husband called her from home and all she knew was that agents came to their home and searched it, not from 'where' the google searches occurred.
We found out through the Suffolk Police Department that the searches involved also things my husband looked up at his old job. We were not made aware of this at the time of questioning and were led to believe it was solely from searches from within our house.
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.
If it was misleading, just know that my intention was the truth. And that was what I knew as the truth until about ten minutes ago. That there were other circumstances involved was something we all were unaware of.
Let's all breathe a sigh of relief because the guy googled the words at work, not home.
As an aside, today's Guardian has a story about the NSA paying its British counterpart, GCHQ lots of money to have access and influence over it.
The US government has paid at least £100m to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain's intelligence gathering programmes.
Seems the Brits are more worried about losing control over their own spying, not the fact of the spying.