You already admitted on a public message board that you have watched porn, so the NSA has all the data they need on you. You might as well at least continue to get some joy out of it.
Are you sure that you and the NSA would agree on what constitutes ‘reasonable suspicion’? Because I have a hunch that their fishing net has a far wider scope and a far finer mesh than you imagine.
Just wait until the 22nd Century, when telepathy’s invented. Not even our thoughts will be private. :eek:
I’ll deal with that when and if it happens. I think that the potential for abuse and over-extending is no more or less now than they’ve ever done, so it’s not anything to get up in arms about.
But but, perhaps if I quit, by the time years pass, they won’t be able to humiliate me!
The problem is multifold, so to respond to what seems to be so far off base:
-the whole purpose of the 4th amendment is to ensure the govrnment only looks at you if they ahve evidence of serious crimes.
-the extent of laws today is such that you are guaranteed to be breaking some, even inadvertently, every day. (For example - If your computer downlaods a web page where an illegal image is stored, but shown as a single pixel on the page- technically you are violating the law and wills pend jail time and your life can be ruined as you have to register as a sex offender). You violate the law when you jaywalk. The kid who just snuck up to the top of the new World Trade Center faces up to 90 days in jail for “trespassing”. Laws are out of control. The typical politician would rather create a new law than enforce the ones they have.
-even if they can’t convict you, they can do what I call the “OJ Conviction” - you will go broke paying for lawyers to get off on the charges.
-once the government has a long list of things they can harass any citizen with, they don’t have the time to take them all to trial. So… who do they pick? Why, their enemies and critics, of course.
-if as Toom’s link shows, the government can effectively lie, violate your privacy when it’s not allowed, and still convict you - who keeps tabs on them?
- the next step is to plant the evidence. You go to this web page? We’ll put the hidden image there so we can arrest you. Then we can legitimately search your home and computer files… The gestapo goes from chaing enemies to making them when convenient.
The fact that some people can get away with some things sometimes is the price we pay for not having to apy off the secret police every time we step out the door.
I never thought that Google searches alone will lead to an arrest and conviction unless it is for something like child porn. I am not the OP. I was just replying to it. I still don’t like the NSA or approve of its activities though. They still represent a direct violation of privacy and an indirect threat to due process if they pass information along to other agencies even for honest and harmless Americans.
Read this article in Wired magazine from March 2012 (well before the latest revelations). It details their newest data center in Utah and its spectacular capacity now and its mind boggling future capacity. No government can build something like that without being tempted to use it in ever-increasing invasive ways.
No you haven’t.
The Fourth Amendment protects U.S. citizens against unwarranted search and seizure of property. It does not specifically guard against general invasion of privacy, and while the SCOTUS has interpreted it that way in the past, recent decisions (such as U.S. vs Graham) have gradually eroded away that expectation of privacy. The way things are going, it won’t be long until it’s gone completely.
Richard Ledgett, is that you? 
"If I’m interested in chemistry and I google search “ammonium nitrate”. I have found that Ammonium Sulfide is much more effective in dealing with those you don’t want around. Plus it won’t ring any bells at Langley when you google it.
It’s kind of pie-in-the-sky thinking to believe that the NSA is limited by much of anything except money, isn’t it? We know the government routinely jails, tortures, and disappears people around the world without much oversight. We know they deport or kill US citizens without due process.
The NSA isn’t staffed by idiots. You’re safe because you’re harmless and a worthless target, not because some magical document is protecting your rights. If you had the power to build a 90% complete profile of every person in your country, and you could choose to prosecute/detain/ship out/assassinate any of them at will, with or without going through the courts, would you waste that power willy-nilly and cause widespread public outrage? No. You focus on the people that nobody cares about. The foreigners, the Muslims, the people doing dangerous things and the people you don’t like. Not some silly dude deliberately taunting you because they’ve got too much time on their hands.
In modern America, computer and phone watches you. We are now worse than the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. I don’t care if anything comes from it or not in most practical terms for the vast majority of people, it is still an abomination. The government isn’t some abstract concept. It is manned by real people with their individual motives. Anyone with access to the massive amounts of data NSA collects on individuals can use that against them at will unilaterally. You may think you are an innocent person but no one truly is. You cannot live in our society without breaking some laws simply because some of them are contradictory. Good luck. You just arrived in 1984 thirty years later.
Sure. We always knew this was going to happen. It’s an inevitable use of technology, an inevitable corruption of power, and every country in the world that can do it probably does it to some degree. What was surprising about Snowden isn’t that it was going on, but that the NSA was dumb enough to let it leak out so publicly. Couldn’t keep their own secrets. You cannot rely on your government to protect you from itself, only from each other and from foreigners – if you’re lucky.
If you want to be safe from the American government, work hard, spend money, shut up, and watch a lot of TV. Be a nobody. Your freedom depends on your insignificance, not your innocence. Innocence is irrelevant because the law is only relevant for minor cases; do anything significant and extrajudicial treatment is all but guaranteed.
And yet here you are, on a FREE message board, FREELY expressing your opinion, and after you’re done you are FREE to walk away and watch reality TV or whatever. C’mon, man…our government may be corrupt as shit but comparing them with the Soviet Union? Really??? You should read up on the history of Russia’s secret police, or other countries such as in South America where people still need to be careful what they say in public or they’ll disappear in the night, just like their neighbor did last month.
Sound advice, but…think about it. If it were that easy to silence someone, then why are people like Michael Moore and Andrew Sullivan and even Barack Obama himself (before he was elected) still walking around free? Heck, even Julian Assange himself was never “set up” in any obvious way, the gov’t had to find some really dumb obscure Swedish law to smear him with.
And as for “assassinating American citizens” – al’Awlaki? Really?? Can anyone seriously argue against taking him out just because he had a U.S. Passport?
(Oh God, I can’t believe I’m actually defending the American government – HOLY SHIT I’M BECOMING MY FATHER!!!)
Something the OMG-they’re-watching-everything-we-do crowd fails to realize, is the incredibly vast amount of data people generate every day through the Internet and other means. Any government watchers are swamped in torrents of information they couldn’t possibly begin to collate and investigate in any systematic and efficient way. If the NSA attempted to look into every dingbat Google search it’d never get anything done.
Anecdote: Back in the '90s (after Oklahoma City but (obviously) before 9/11), I went to a gardening supply outlet in Texas to buy a small bag of organic nitrate-based fertilizer. A somewhat suspicious store worker asked me what I planned to do with it. Uh, fertilize plants? Well O.K. then.
Seriously, if you run a business called “Southwest Fertilizer” you have to expect the occasional customer who wants to buy fertilizer. :smack:
As for an early “fact” of the pressure-cooker bust mentioned in this rather intemperate-for-GQ OP and OP followup (hi mod!) not only does one swallow not make a summer, but I am willing to bet that he is referring to a news account shortly after the Boston Marathon bombing. It was false.
No cite, to match no cite.
Except, that would be a case of someone getting busted for actually purchasing pressure cookers, ammonium nitrate, or what have you – the original question was about arrests based on Google searches alone, and so far the answer is, as far as anyone can determine, zero to none.
The Soviet Union did not have the ability to trace your every move via GPS in your phone and car, secretly record your conversations by turning on your cell phone, trace your social and intellectual habits via the internet.
Granted the US government is not as authoritarian as the USSR, but we do have better spy capacity.
Huh. I believe the folks in charge of illegal porn are Homeland Security, at least domestically. And also at least domestically any truly illegal porn that were Google-accessible would be safely presumed to be a sting bait anyway.
Which I should hope they at least are using in a cost effective way.
As someone else said, NSA is not tasked with paying attention to your average domestic dude who is seeking info on setting up a pot grow, or who is the very, very wrong kind of dog lover. And I’d imagine that they’d soon grow annoyed at requests for such info from a couple hundred counties from across 50 states.* “So, you want us to let YOU see what’s in our files? Nice try, Sherriff Buford.”*
That’s a cool hobby, I hope it ends well for you. Don’t worry about black vans, if they want you, they’ll probably send regular cops, and/or investigators wearing suits.