Thread: Be Careful What You Google For (DHS might find it)

[You can disregard the following altogether by simply searching with startpage, which does not record your identity while it does a multiple engine search. To use startpage or install startpage as your default search engine, click here. If for no other reason than privacy, I personally wouldn't search without it.]

New Reasons to Be Careful What You Google For

by Lee Bellinger (?) in "Independent Living" for May, 2013

Privacy Tips

Internet search terms and other online information can be analyzed by law enforcement software to tag "suspicious" activity. Many profiles of honest, law-abiding individuals get caught in the net.

Government entities can and do use the personal information they collect to map out social networks, identify behavioral tendencies, and identify potentially undesirable individuals. We can see the great potential for abuse of this information by those in power who might have a bias against someone's political preference, business activity, or interest in tax avoidance strategies.

Government authorities often request aggregated data from private companies. Some companies will wait for a court order like a warrant or a subpoena to produce any records, while thousands of others produce the information voluntarily.

. . . Based on Google's Transparency Report, the company has complied with U.S. government requests 92% of the time on average, since 2009.

To better protect what you search for on Google, do NOT log into your Google account before you start searching on the Internet. Here's why: When you are logged into your Google account, everything you do on Google is tied directly to you. [But even when you aren't logged into your Google account, everything you do on Google is tied directly to your logged IP address.]

Dangerous Internet Search Terms

In 2012, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a Freedom of Information Act request, and ultimately sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to get a hold of its 2011 Analyst's Desktop Binder. This manual contains the list of keywords and phrases the DHS monitors for on online networks and organizations... words "that 'reflect adversely' on the government," according to the Daily Mail.

The bottom line? Almost everything and anything you say can potentially [the operative word here] put a bull's-eye on your back when it comes to a DHS analyst on the prowl for suspicious speech. See for yourself:

Drill Wave Help Ice
Pork Sick Crest Plot
Smart Who Cloud San Diego
Leak Airport Social Media Crash
Burn Electric Aid
Agriculture Target Worm

These are just some of the trigger words. You can find more, along with additional online privacy and security tips, in the Special Report "99 Things NEVER to Search for on Google," published by American Lantern Press.

[But if "almost everything and anything you say" makes you suspicious, then the resulting information analysis overload implies insignificance: that nothing you say makes you any more suspicious than anyone else. If DHS didn't have the manpower and the budget to keep track of three Isl@mist tεrrσrista before their Boston Marathon bσmb att@ck, then DHS can't follow up on "triggεr word infractionaries" either. Get a grip.]