A Long Island journalist set the internet aflame today by claiming that Joint Terrorism Task Force agents visited her house to find out why Google searches for “pressure cooker” and “backpack” were run from the family’s internet connection.

“Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling,” wrote Michele Catalano, in a widely-circulated post to Medium.com. “Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. Someone whose job it is to piece together the things people do on the internet raised the red flag when they saw our search history.”

Though Catalano declined all interview requests from reporters, and omitted key details from her story, news outlets pounced on the tale, speculating variously that NSA monitoring might have made Catalano a target, or that Google might be providing the feds with a feed of everyone who searches on suspicious terms.

"Yes, The FBI Is Tracking American Google Searches,” read Gizmodo’s headline, one of many blowing up the story.

But the local police department that actually visited Catalano’s husband finally explained themselves, and it turns out the story is more about a dispute with the husband's former employer than rampant secret police surveillance. Here’s the statement from the Suffolk County Police Department:

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. 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.' After interviewing the company representatives, Suffolk County Police Detectives visited the subject's home to ask about the suspicious internet searches. The incident was investigated by Suffolk County Police Department's Criminal Intelligence Detectives and was determined to be non-criminal in nature.

Catalano did not respond to repeated inquiries via e-mail and Twitter for this story, and her husband did not respond to a message sent through LinkedIn. But Catalano's Twitter timeline indicates that her husband lost his job in May.

At a time where we’re treated almost daily to new revelations about covert government surveillance, it’s easy to see why this story found traction. But bogus claims of secret data mining and “profiling” detract from the real news. So please let’s stop.