UPDATE: Local police say the Catalanos were reported by an employer. See something, say something — even if you’re just a possibly-paranoid job creator, I guess!
I’m surprised no one showed up here. I’ve researched both these things in the past few months:
Freelance journalist Michele Catalano, a former music contributor at Forbes, received a friendly visit at her Long Island home from six agents from a joint terrorism task force on Wednesday morning.
In March Google reported that the FBI monitors the Web for potential terrorist activity, although the FBI told Adrien Chen of Gawker that the “FBI had no part in this law enforcement action.”
The FBI told to the Guardian that Catalano was “visited by Nassau County police department … They were working in conjunction with Suffolk County police department.”
Catalano said she had researched pressure cookers and her husband was looking for a backpack, a combination of terms that raises flags in the wake of bombings at the Boston Marathon on April 15 that killed three people and injured more than 260.
In a post describing the incident, Catalano writes:
Mostly I felt a great sense of anxiety. This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.
“But if you’re not doing anything wrong, what’s the big deal?”
Is this the nation that sent 5 million men to wade ashore at Omaha Beach, Tarawa and Iwo Jima? That lived for 50 years in the shadow of thousands of Soviet ICBMs? We are now terrified by college boys with 10 pounds of explosives or with plastic explosives in their shoes?
What the hell is going on here? This is not about “terrorists” 8,000 miles away who have to deliver bombs by hand. This is about terrifying the mass of Americans into submission and controlling them to prevent any kind of uprising or resistance to the corporate oligarchs.
tags: Islam, explosive, bomb. terror, Guantanamo, Manning, Snowden, backpack, pressure cooker, revolution, communism, Afghanistan, drone, Yemen, Sudan, ….
About a week after the Boston incident I was shopping online for a pressure canner and it did cross my mind that my search might be picked up by someone other than the usual internet advertisers. When I went down to the hardware store to purchase one, it crossed my mind not to use my debit card… The lady at the register said something about my purchase, too. Lord have mercy…
That’s the way it was in Stalin’s time. Be careful. Watch your step. Watch what you say, and who you say it to. Careful what you write down. Don’t use the telephone. What will the teacher think? Tell your kids to be careful too.