Professional writer Michele Catalano has been trying to put together the pieces. Why did the cops show up at her door demanding to know what her and her husband knew about pressure cookers? Was it because he was Googling backpacks and she was Googling pressure cookers? That is, after all, what these armed-to-the-teeth investigators want to know.
“[T]hey were peppering my husband with questions,” she later wrote, as the Atlantic Wire reported. “Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked.”
“Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? My husband, ever the oppositional kind, asked them if they themselves weren’t curious as to how a pressure cooker bomb works, if they ever looked it up. Two of them admitted they did.”
Sounds like all around hilarity, except for the disturbing question: did Google snitch on them for searching for “Backpacks” and “pressure cookers” (two items no law-abiding citizen would ever look for in the same day)?
But the riddle has been solved. It wasn’t Google, but the husband’s former employer, who called the police.
“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,” explained police, as reported on TechCrunch. “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.””
So the paranoid computer company, which seems to be Speco Technologies, was concerned that their former employee was going to run a marathon on their premises.