Police rebuff woman’s claim that Google search led to FBI visit

LONG ISLAND, N.Y. — A Long Island woman set off an Internet firestorm this week after claiming federal agents had visited her home due to her Google searches, but police say an old-fashioned tip is what led to the visit.

Michele Catalano, a Long Island-based journalist who has written for Forbes and Boing Boing, posted on her blog about the incident. She said she and her husband had searched on separate occasions for pressure cookers and backpacks, and that the searches led to the federal visit.

“Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling,” she wrote. “Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. 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.”

She said her husband was home Wednesday morning when six men in casual clothing surrounded the family’s home.

Her husband “walked outside and the men greeted him by flashing badges,” she wrote. “He could see they all had guns holstered in their waistbands.”

After doing a cursory search of the home, the “six agents from the joint terrorism task force,” as Catalano describes them, asked her husband if he had any bombs or had ever looked up how to make a pressure-cooker bomb.

Catalano said the visit was casual and ended uneventfully, but left her with a sense of anxiety that she attributed to living in an age during which “you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.”

But the Suffolk County Police Department said Thursday the search took place not because of federal profiling, but because of a tip from a computer company.

“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 statement said. “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.’”

Police did not confirm who the “recently released employee” was. Catalano had not updated her blog post as of Thursday evening.

That Catalano’s story went viral so quickly is testament to the sensitivity many people feel toward government surveillance in the post-9/11 era, and particularly after the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings that killed three people and reopened a nationwide dialogue on security versus a right to privacy.

Since then, the National Security Administration has come under fire for an Internet data project leaked to the Guardian by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who provided documents describing a program that can monitor and analyze everything from emails to online chats.

Snowden, wanted in the U.S. for leaking the details of the program, was granted one-year temporary asylum by Russian officials on Thursday.

Contact Stephanie Grimes at sgrimes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @steph_grimes on Twitter.