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Jeffrey Kantor, a former government contractor in Virginia, is suing the government because he believes they launched an elaborate campaign of harassment against him based almost entirely on an innocent Google search that turned sinister.
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His legal complaint says that in October of 2009, when he worked for Appian, he was doing some personal googling on office equipment, and his intended search, “How do I build a radio-controlled airplane,” transformed into “how do I build a radio-controlled bomb.” He blames the search engine’s autocomplete function.
He also complains that government agents showed up at his work and interrogated him about it, but that their game of “good cop/bad cop” stretched out over five months, during which time they repeatedly made “anti-semitic comments.” He says they monitored things like his library book checkouts.
He says the harassment was turning into veiled death threats, so he sought protection from the Anti-Defamation League. After that, he claims the government sent more death threats. He wants $58.8 million for his trouble.
The thing is, his story doesn’t pass a basic bullshit test. When it comes to Google’s autocomplete, it takes two to tango. There’s no “autocorrect” for Google searches in a browser. “Autocomplete” and “autocorrect” are two very different things. This is autocorrect:
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Google’s “Autocomplete” doesn’t work that way. Its dropdown menu gives you options, but if you keep typing, you’ll probably search what you were going to search for in the first place. It only “corrects” your search in the sense that if a query comes up that’s worded bettter than yours, you can opt for it, and assume it probably gets better results because it’s more common.
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But you still have to be the one to go down and click on any of these search suggestions. The search engine doesn’t do it for you. Google, for their part, seem to take a completely agnostic approach, and just let you get yourself into trouble. If you were typing, “How to kill, press flowers,” (unlikely I know, but I needed an example) you could get something sinister, but you’d still have to actively select it and hit enter:
So Kantor can’t claim his search was out of his control altogether.
Googling “how to kill president Obama,” by the way, seems like the worst way to gather intel for your actual assassination plot, since no one can write about it from experience. But there are searches the normally laissez-faire Google does seem to have censored in autocorrect:
Seriously, without Silk Road, how do you buy heroin online? Why won’t you tell me, Google?
Getting back to Jeffrey Kantor’s claim, he couldn’t even have been in the situation he claims to be in. Autocomplete wouldn’t place “bomb” above “car”, and even if you accidentally hit “b” for “bomb” instead of “p” for plane, there are plenty of other “b” queries:
I’m not saying Kantor was ever going to make bombs. In 2009, I bet he probably just got curious about remote-controlled bombs, and there’s no episode of How it’s Made about them. It’s not illegal to be curious, and even if you’re searching for how to make a radio-controlled airplane, you’re digging up instructions on something just as deadly as a bomb.
Now if you’ll excuse me, after researching this story I have to purge my extremely incriminating search history.
