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DoJ's Gag Order on Reason Has Been Lifted
- ddp 11y agoTL;DR - Judge rubber stamps DoJ's gag order without any basis. He does this because he is friends with another judge who was the target of someone's First Amendment rant in a forum on Reason.
- dimino 11y agoI get that I shouldn't really expect anything else from popehat, but how alienating is this article to people who aren't already onboard with this point of view?
- saryant 11y agohttps://twitter.com/Popehat/status/613034680779051008 https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/613034680779051008
- dimino 11y agoClassy. What a waste of effort, writing the article was, then. I hope it was at least cathartic, because it sure as shit isn't forwarding the conversation one fucking iota.
- acheron 11y agoConsidering Ken broke the story in the first place, and there would be no "conversation" otherwise, I'm pretty sure he's done approximately infinitely more to "forward" it than you have.
- dimino 11y agoActually, I'd argue he's set the entire conversation back considerably. My inaction is much less harmful than this post, to the conversation overall.
- fennecfoxen 11y agoHey, man, I tried something less Popehatty: it just didn't take off. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749699
- noobermin 11y agoFWIW, thanks for posting that. I can hardly read the OP.
- mariodiana 11y ago"Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch note that the subpoena originally appeared without an accompanying gag order. Instead, it only contained a request that the contents of the order not be shared with anyone." The lesson there is that if you get a subpoena without a gag order, you need to immediately broadcast it far and wide -- before the gag order comes.
- beedogs 11y agoWow. Just when I thought Obama's DoJ couldn't come off looking any more amateurish. They're really an embarrassment.
- wyager 11y agoAt the risk of violating Hanlon's razor, this seems more a case of the DoJ being malicious than being amateurish.
- Semiapies 11y agoThis sort of behavior is the essence of "professionalism".
- ddp 11y agoOh, come on. You're not really surprised are you? Obama kept all of the questionable Bush appointments even though he could have fired them. Just like he kept the entire national security team and all of the Goldman Sachs mafia that's running Treasury and the Fed. You were expecting change?
- spotman 11y agoI wish you weren't right, but I agree. smoke, mirrors, and consistency. sigh.
- jpreiland 11y agohow foolish to expect change from someone whose campaign slogan was 'change'
- CWuestefeld 11y ago... or to decry gag orders from what was promised to be "the most transparent administration in history".
- tobylane 11y ago
- jedberg 11y agoThis happens all the time. At reddit we would get requests from law enforcement asking for email addresses and other private information. Luckily in our case we could simply reply that we didn't know, since we didn't require any personal information to sign up and didn't keep IP address logs that long. But having been on the other side of the coin, investigating computer crime, I can tell you why it happens. It's really easy to make a request for information, and in most cases, the person you're asking will just willingly give it up even though they don't legally have to, either because they want to be helpful or because they don't know about their legal rights. Even if the evidence can't be used to build a case against the person in court, it can still be used to lead down a path towards finding the person and gathering evidence that is admissible.
- dimino 11y ago> Even if the evidence can't be used to build a case against the person in court, it can still be used to lead down a path towards finding the person and gathering evidence that is admissible. It makes sense to do this, but I can already hear the cries of parallel construction from my bunker 20 floors below sea level.
- mseebach 11y agoThat's great, but the government has 50 ways of fucking up your life (and that's just before breakfast) without getting anywhere near a court room.
- jellicle 11y agoWhy would it not be admissible?
- barney54 11y agoThis is a really big deal and the story deserves more coverage since apparently it happens all the time. Who would have thought that we have to continue to foment for free speech even in 2015, but apparently we have to!
- Aqueous 11y agoFree speech doesn't include yelling fire in a crowded theater, nor does it include making suggestions of physical violence against a judge. This entire argument seems to revolve around the author's subjective notion of a 'credible threat,' but describing a specific act of physical violence (putting a human through a wood-chipper) against a specific person who also happens to be a public official (a sitting U.S. judge) could cause that person, if they are reasonable, to feel that their life was in danger. That's the standard. Edit: or cause other reasonable people to believe that the individual's life was in danger
- nostromo 11y ago> The subpoena also covered such obviously harmless comments as: "I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for that horrible woman," and "I'd prefer a hellish place on Earth be reserved for her as well." http://reason.com/blog/2015/06/19/government-stifles-speech http://reason.com/blog/2015/06/19/government-stifles-speech This was obviously an overreach.
- AndrewBissell 11y agoYou've got to love how the most popular anti-free speech canard actually comes from a Supreme Court justice upholding a man's imprisonment for opposing a military draft.
- jayess 11y agohttps://popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-censorship-tropes-in-the-medias-coverage-of-free-speech-controversies/ https://popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-cens...
- 11y ago
- ohitsdom 11y agoExcellent perspective on how even an innocent US attorney could be unknowingly using their power to bully. A request or recommendation is read as a threat by most.
- AndrewBissell 11y agoThe Hit n Run commenters had a fun reaction to the whole thing involving changing their handles to variations on the word "woodchipper."
- vermontdevil 11y agoProblem is our society rewards aggressive prosecutors greatly in a variety of ways. But we don't hold them accountable when they are caught doing the wrong things. The worst I can remember is disbarring that prosecutor in North Carolina in the Duke Lacrosse case. So we have a system of overly aggressive prosecutors thinking this is the best career path regardless of legal ethics, respect to the Constitution, etc. It'll never end until we start pushing them back and demand better professionalism and respect.