The court filing says they seized his laptop and phone, and seems to suggest all this information came from examining those devices. The google searches were probably just sitting in his browser history.
Oh, and then the idiot went and bought another laptop the very next day, despite explicit military orders not to. His opsec skills seem to be lacking.
This is probably exactly what happened. I bet he used Chrome as well. It doesn't really help that Google Chrome keeps history basically forever (on the order of months), even without signing into a Google Account.
My understanding is that incognito mode just doesn’t save local browser history. Your ISP and google can still log what you search based on IP or login state.
Is the IP hidden if I search from my workplace, where there are 250 computers from several startups behind a single IP? (and it’s not a corporate computer) Granted, Google can identify browsers uniquely using fingerprinting, even with Incognito.
FISA. All that Patriot Act bullshit is still around most likely, including the secret courts to get secret warrants. It was supposed to be for terrorism, but just about everyone in history warned us over and over that these things get repurposed.
Guantanamo Bay is still around. The legacy of the Bush administration is for real.
I don't think anyone takes it as a positive. It's just not what voters vote on. If they support one candidate's policies more than another's, they won't flip because of that issue. The example of Bill Clinton demonstrates that this happens across the political spectrum, and his feminist supporters were the ones making this argument back then. They got criticized for being hypocritical, but in politics you have to prioritize.
I do actually think they see it as a positive. It is not just that they do not care. It is that it heightens his credit in their eyes and they get to see him as victim.
At the least, it often makes them feel empowered to speak out in favor of forgetting all about the issue, and emboldening them to push for whatever the politician pushes that they agree with. At least in the US, you can hop on social media and take a look at your local newspaper or news channel's posts, and see some of the truly insane comments (and I use insane here as in bringing up politics to promote their voted politician, or smear the other side, when the issue is something at a local level or unaffected by politics in any way).
What he did to win the scroll competition had to do with data analysis, not ancient history, so of course it could be relevant. But none of us, including the author of the article, knows what they're specifically doing, so it's not possible to say how relevant it is. It's a pity the reporter didn't do some reporting about that, instead of writing a hit piece calling them lackeys.
You're more confident about that than I am. I find it easy to imagine how a person who produces the first kind of analysis could be technically useful in analyzing government data. He presumably didn't know anything about ancient scrolls before working on the first thing, so he has a track record of conquering a steep learning curve.
That seems entirely relevant - getting to the bottom of a cryptic and poorly documented puzzle without any help from the contemporaries (in the case of the scrolls, because the are dead, in the case of government employees, because it’s not in their interests).
I write that only half in jest. Maybe less than half.
Since when did winning competitions require experience optimizing costs across various industries?
I don't think anybody is doubting they're smart, just that they have no experience doing this kind of work and are now being trusted by the highest level of government to do it.
