-
stannenb commented on the blog post Tarek Mehanna’s Sentence Criminalizes the Right of Muslims to “Vent” Their Frustrations
This is a local story to me, too, and I happened to go to a presentation by Tareq Mehanna’s lawyers a few weeks ago.
The verdict, they said, stunned the courthouse. Everyone, meaning press, US Marshals, courthouse staff, all expected a not guilty verdict. The lawyers were clear to say that this wasn’t just the delusion of a committed defense team, everyone thought that the prosecutions experts had been demolished on the stand, and that they had made the case that this was a freedom of expression issue.
Mehanna has a strong support network. Remember, he’s a young man from a well-to-do suburb, represented by some seriously experienced attorneys (some of them, for example, are court appointed to represent Whitey Bulger and represented John Salvi, the anti-abortion murderer/terrorist). They’ve been able to articulate just how outrageous this case is with a level of credibility that can’t be questioned. The presentation I went to was titled “Translation as Terror”, which is both accurate and a powerful framing.
-
stannenb commented on the diary post Why FOIA Is Important by Kevin Baron.
It’s also worth looking at MuckRock http://www.muckrock.com/ which is an effort to make FOIA requests more of a collective endeavor. It makes both the FOIA request and the resulting documents public.
-
stannenb commented on the blog post Twitter Allows for Censorship of Tweets in Individual Countries
What your article misses is that Twitter deftly showed how to workaround their own censorship by overriding the country setting: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169220
If Twitter thinks you’re in Germany and they’ve been forced to censor some anti-semitic tweets, just tell Twitter they’re wrong and you’re really in Israel, and you’ll get to see them in all their glory.
Twitter lives in the real world, one which could put their own employees at risk in countries that want to censor Twitter. Given that they’ve taken a position that they need to follow the laws of the countries in which their users live, they couldn’t have been more transparent or more flexible in how they handled this.
-
stannenb commented on the blog post Did the Administration’s Own Propensity for Leaks Crash the SEAL’s Blackhawk?
Destroyed my own url. The text I cited is here.
-
stannenb commented on the blog post Did the Administration’s Own Propensity for Leaks Crash the SEAL’s Blackhawk?
I’ll note the following the following from Joe Biden shortly after the raid that killed Bin Laden:
He was also proud of his former colleagues on Capitol Hill. “What was even more extraordinary was — and I’m sure former administration officials would appreciate this more than anyone — there was such an absolute overwhelming desire to accomplish this mission that although for over several months we were in the process of planning it, and there were as many as 16 members of Congress that were briefed on it, not a single solitary thing leaked.”
I read elsewhere (and I can’t find the citation right now) that Congress was briefed because they had to get a special appropriation for the costs of this operation, something I find a bit hard to believe.
But, if you told 16 members of congress about this, you’d hear the leak clock ticking, too.
