You are right on the quoting thing.  I could have sworn it said &quot;shortly before&quot; but it said &quot;just before&quot;.  My mistake.  Although those are almost semantically identical so I am a little confused on why you are calling it out in such specificity.<p>&gt;They did not use the day or week of the Boston Bombing as their baseline. Don&#x27;t misrepresent the research.<p>Snowden&#x27;s leaks came out less than two months after the largest terrorist attack on US soil since 9&#x2F;11.  Since they are measuring monthly stats, they are using either the month of or the month after the Boston bombings as part of their &quot;just before&quot; time frame.  If you look at all those number, the 3 million is really the biggest outlier.  Isn&#x27;t it possible that views for these terrorist related pages generally falls between 2 and 2.5 million with 20-50% jumps in page views in the aftermath of large terrorist attacks?