Surveillance Society Security Hysteria: Police Harrassing People for Their Internet Search Habits

We should be surprised to read stories like this, but unfortunately, it is not surprising at all.  From The Guardian:

It was a confluence of magnificent proportions that led to six agents from the joint terrorism task force to knock on my door Wednesday morning. Little did my husband and I know that our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things were creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling. 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.

Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in "these times" now. And in these times, when things like the Boston bombing happen, you spend a lot of time on the internet reading about it and, if you are my exceedingly curious, news junkie 20-year-old son, you click a lot of links when you read the myriad of stories. You might just read a CNN piece about how bomb making instructions are readily available on the internet and you will in all probability, if you are that kid, click the link provided.