I think there's more to it simply on the basis that sending three SUV's with at least six agents to investigate people would be almost impossible from an economic standpoint. That is extremely costly and time-consuming, not to mention the amount of lead-time required to brief agents and investigate this family. If they did that for every suspicious search query combination, they'd be awfully busy.

I don't even doubt that their family was paid a visit by agents. However I wouldn't be surprised if certain details were left out to sell a certain angle on this story. For example, to create a headline-worthy story she might have gone to unreasonable lengths to create the illusion of suspicious activity without actually doing anything illegal.

Edit:

I checked the Atlantic Wire story and was immediately turned-off by the photo. It is meant to mislead the reader into thinking the subjects are members of the family being described in the story. However if you scroll to the end you see in grayed-out type:

Photo: Massachusetts police search a home after the Boston bombings.

News these days is a complete joke. Anybody who thinks this is real journalism should go read Ryan Holiday's Confessions of a Media Manipulator. It's impossible to read or watch most news sources without a conscious level of skepticism.

Not sure about the financial side, the US government has a massive amount of resources to work with. The cost of employing 500 agents would be a fraction of the cost of say, a single military helicopter.

To say nothing of the bureaucratic fun that occurs when the US government is forced to work with itself in a JTTF-type situation.

1. Departments are territorial and image conscious (most being headed by elected officials or political appointees).

2. Individuals don't get promoted by passing up chances to work on those sorts of investigations. Even if they're nonsense.

If the feds want to check something out in a joint investigation situation, I can easily see 'federal agents want to have a talk' becoming 2 feds + 2 state/county + 2 local detectives.

There's a world of difference between "using it" and sending agents out to chase down leads that are statistically worthless. You can believe that they have and are otherwise using such a system while simultaneously rejecting the idea that they'd be wasting time and resources in this way.

Until the Snowden episode, sending agents to track down leads that were statistically worthless was worse than just a waste of resources, because the problem US they're actually trying to solve is "how do we monitor suspects whilst managing not to give away how much we know to journo-bloggers so passionate about their right to freedom of speech they might publicly question why the government is scrutinizing their search terms".[1]

The intersection of "pressure cooker", "backpack" and visits to overseas countries not known for sponsoring low-level terrorism is perhaps not the most obvious criterion for identifying terrorists, so presumably they'd also have to flag most of the ~12,000 people who searched for "bomb-making" last month, for example, and perhaps some more innocuous ones like independent searches for "martyr" and "white house" or "chechnya" and "aeroplane". That's a lot of resource.

Now even if they're pretty selective about who they actually pay a visit to, they're going to return a lot of false positives. No big deal, except that pre-Snowden the programme is supposed to be a secret and even within the subset of people flagging the "possible terrorist" alert they're going to investigate far more journalists (common occupation) than terrorists (rare occupation). Which is a bit of a problem if their modus operandi is instructing police to knock on people's doors and ask them whether they were searching for X on the internet. Was this really PRISM's raison d'etre?

The alternate hypothesis involves a freelance writer famous solely for her number of Twitter followers embellishing her police enquiry story with some very topical themes.

[1]If I worked in intelligence I'd solve that problem by not telling local cops what potential suspects had been doing on the internet...

The stated policy under the Bush Administration is that if there was even a 1% chance that a lead might be legitimate, then the government should pursue it with all available resources.

The use of resources shows that we're serious - so yeah, they waste them. Profligately. Or haven't you flown recently?

I'm not necessarily describing his thought process, but here's how I see it.

The bigger and more important something is, the more rigor, care and 'cool' should be applied to it.

A big part of me is just screaming about all of this crap. But it's important to settle down, and apply even more reason and rigor.

Be cool; stay focused; think about the problem; work the problem.

Isn’t it the NSA who does the mass-surveillance? Why whould they share their findings with e.g. the FBI?

Strictly speaking it's been the FBI doing the surveillance itself and turning the data over for storage to NSA, if I understand the org. structure correctly.

I must admit I haven’t read the articles about Snowden’s discloures that close. Do you have any links to share regarding the FBI:s involvement?

The original WaPo/Guardian articles on PRISM are a good start, and I think one of the followup NYT articles was even more specific about how the NSA manages to capture information from domestic providers even though they're legally not allowed to intercept domestically.

Instead they have FBI install data collection devices, have the FBI runs NSLs/warrants as needed, etc. NSA just does the spook work after all that is done.

Thanks. Ever since I read Clifford Stoll’s ”The Cuckoo’s Egg” I’ve been under the impression that the NSA and the FBI hated each other :)

Well that pretty much was the case, right up until 9/11. ;)