Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 463 posts

Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation

#341

Post by everyone »

noblethrasher wrote: post #287
everyone wrote: post #269

For me the most absurd thing is that all this erosion of peoples rights and several wars have been justified by the threat of terrorism. I'm not going to even bother finding some statistics to post right now but the actual threat of terrorism is vanishingly small. For example in 2012, more Americans died crushed by their TVs or furniture than from terrorism. http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/stats-on-human-rights/st…

Be careful with this kind of argument. Among the reasons that we object to the treatment of Mr. Miranda et. al. is that it can cause a chilling effect, similar to what terrorism does. Are you prepared to argue that the threat of home furniture will ever cause a chilling effect?

Yes, I agree there is a difference between an accident and an attack. The main point I'm making is the organisations involved are clearly using terrorism as a pretext, greatly inflating its media presence. If the US for example really wanted to reduce terrorism things like better universal education and social welfare would probably really be effective as the vast majority of the US' terrorism is internal. (Killing of abortion clinic doctors and so forth)

Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation

#342

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #187
acqq wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they never had. The goal was to point that it's not like in the movies. He can't demand the lawyer, he can't even stay silent. A lot of things to slip the tongue during the nine hours of interrogation. Being detained under terrorist laws, it must have occurred to him that they can even throw him in Guantanamo and claim legality. Intimidation, you bet!

Guantanamo is not a UK facility.

[deleted]

Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation

#343

Post by acqq »

jacquesm wrote: post #187
acqq wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they never had. The goal was to point that it's not like in the movies. He can't demand the lawyer, he can't even stay silent. A lot of things to slip the tongue during the nine hours of interrogation. Being detained under terrorist laws, it must have occurred to him that they can even throw him in Guantanamo and claim legality. Intimidation, you bet!

Guantanamo is not a UK facility.

Do you claim that UK doesn't deliver the "terrorist suspects" to the US? Do you claim that US then never places somebody in Guantanamo? Do you claim such order of events is impossible?

Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation

#344

Post by regularfry »

jacquesm wrote: post #237
rmk2 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither the BBC, Independent, The Sun nor Daily Mail report on it; q.e.d., the "general public" doesn't care. Edit: The Sun does, however, have boobs on its homepage, the Daily Mail talks about celebrities and the BBC's international site talks about Syria, Gibraltar and Usain Bolt, with its England page concerned with assisted suicide, a rider who died after a horse accident, something about climate activists and th…

This could be due to them receiving D-Notices.

It's possible, but I don't think it's likely. D-notices are very British things - they're a polite request to the media not to report on specific areas, and carry no legal weight. The assumption is that as long as they are issued in good faith, then the media goes along with them and everyone's happy because the security services don't have to start lobbying for censorship powers.

Now, along comes a situation which looks a lot like an attempt at journalistic suppression by the state. The incentive for the media to go along with any potential D-notice has evaporated because this is just censorship by other means, and if you're going to censor us anyway, why bother with D-notices? Issuing a D-notice over harrassing a journalist (via their family, in this case) would be something of a bodyliner, and I don't think even the British press would have a hard time figuring out what to do about it.

Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation

#345

Post by jlgreco »

nl wrote: post #267
rmk2 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither the BBC, Independent, The Sun nor Daily Mail report on it; q.e.d., the "general public" doesn't care. Edit: The Sun does, however, have boobs on its homepage, the Daily Mail talks about celebrities and the BBC's international site talks about Syria, Gibraltar and Usain Bolt, with its England page concerned with assisted suicide, a rider who died after a horse accident, something about climate activists and th…

It's now the second-to-top story on the www.bbc.co.uk website

Certain HN contributors seem to subscribe to a very strange idea that if something is news on HN, it surely is not news elsewhere.

You see it all the time. Go back to the very first HN discussions about PRISM and phonetapping and you'll see people swearing on their mothers life that nobody outside HN will ever care because it is just a 'nerd issue' or something.

Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation

#346

Post by pinaceae »

so this is one side of the story. no one knows what happened during that questioning, why amd how it started and how his partner acted.

case in point, there was this guy who stripped naked at a TSA check a while back.

you yourself can easily trigger an incident like this and escalate it.

right now there is one side of the story, reported by a deeply involved, non-objective actor. if you ask a parent about what happened to their kid in school when it was expelled you'll also get a very subjective, partisan take.

this "discussion" here smells of the reddit hivemind, quickly jumping to conclusion, throwing around terms like fascism and full of nerd bravado. nobody asks what really happened.

Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation

#347

Post by davidw »

davidw wrote: post #204
jacquesm wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Berlusconi is pretty deep in bed with the Mafia and would not be where he is without them. http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/03/25/uk-italy-mafia-tria...

"It's complicated". He's a fairly rotten guy in many ways; in all likelihood he's made deals with them, but isn't at all involved in their actual operations.

For those actually interested in learning about Berlusconi and Italy, this book is pretty good:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZZMBAS/?tag=dedasys-20

By a former corespondent for The Economist in Italy.

I don't really think the Mafia was an integral component of his success though - in some ways that's an easy out for people looking for someone to blame for the whole Berlusconi phenomenon.

Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation

#348

Post by davidw »

MichaelSalib wrote: post #272
davidw wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While obviously, mafias and governments work on the same problem Bullshit. You'd do well to read more about the Mafia and how it affects places where it's strong. They are badly governed, and generally not good places to live or do business as an honest person. Denmark has a strong government that is quite involved in its citizens lives, but the number of them that end up dead, tortured, with their lives ruined, an…

With respect, you might want to familiarize yourself with some significant papers from the political science literature, starting with http://static.ow.ly/docs/0%20Tilly%2085_5Xr.pdf‎

Access denied. Do you have another link?

Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation

#349

Post by cabalamat »

jacquesm wrote: post #50
grey-area wrote: post #22

The salient quote from Greenwald's article on this: They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop "the terrorists", and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name. [1] This is a great example of why we should treat terrorism lik…

I wonder from how high up this order came. After all, it's not like Greenwald is going to take this lying down and that's something that they could predict quite accurately ahead of time. To abuse these powers on the partner of the journalist that is reporting the abuses is the worst tactical mistake made by any government to date, short of the diversion of a diplomats plane. Taking into account that the UK law enfor…

> I wonder from how high up this order came.

I doubt very much if the police would do this off their own bat. What motive would they have to do so?

So it must have come at least from the Foreign Secretary, but more probably the Prime Minister.

The UK government is currently a coalition. The minor partner, the Liberal Democrats, tend to take a slightly more pro civil liberties line than the two big parties. Did they know about this beforehand? Will they kick up a fuss about it? (I suspect not, their leader is a spineless idiot).

Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation

#350

Post by andreyf »

Amadou wrote: post #309
joezydeco wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, he was contacted. It's amazing that the owner of Lavabit can't even talk about what he can't talk about, yet Greenwald gets a mysterious phone call letting him know Miranda is in the process of being questioned?

First off, those two things aren't even in the same jurisdiction. But, you know that can go both ways. Maybe the caller was sympathetic to Miranda's situation but his hands were tied by the bureaucracy and all of his fellows who were less-than-sympathetic? By alerting Greenwald he let someone else without anything to lose take action. Maybe the reason he wouldn't give out his name is because he didn't want to face in…

I would be very surprised if what would clearly become a high-profile detainment wasn't choreographed ahead of time to the minute, the possible routes of questioning prepared, and the timing and contents of the phone call thought through and structures to elicit particular response. These are moves in a PR campaign of the utmost importance, not some random detention decided by a low-level bureaucrat.
Post reply on HN