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What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

nytimes.com

61–70 of 215 posts

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#63

The New York Times actually broke the story. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensore...

Here's the letter: http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/11/16/magazine/16Lede2/m...

If you read that document carefully, you can see that the EFF edited one of passages that they quoted and did not mention their edit, which is a big no-no. The original letter says:

  (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason,
  it has definite practical significant.
which the EFF quoted as

  (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason,
  it has definite practical significance).

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#65
post #56

Something that's always confused me about the world and people as a whole. Why are so many people hell bent on implementing some "moral standard" that everyone needs to follow? Honestly? There's this bizarre projection of the individual and his/her motivations onto every living being that fails to make any logical sense. Is there any psychological premise for why we feel the need to dictate the behavior of others suc…

MLK was a religious ministry, so his job was to spread some kind of moral standard on other people anyways. So 1) his moral standard where known 2) it was quite fair for his opponents to use those moral standards against him.

(I'm not defending the letter or the FBI, I just think a minute detail of the story is consistent)

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#66

Eventually we'll know what's in his file: The FBI spied on Martin Luther King Jr. in an unsuccessful effort to prove he had ties to Communist organizations. In 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy granted an FBI request to surreptitiously record King and his associates by tapping their phones and placing hidden microphones in their homes, hotel rooms and offices. A 1977 court order sealed transcripts of the surveill…

"... Still, there's something there or they wouldn't be covering it up to protect his saintly image..."

It's interesting... but why would it matter ???

Isn't the issue that Americans endure INVASION of private time... not necessarily how Americans USE their private time ???

Serious question. Just wondering if there is some legal justification for invading privacy to find out ... say ... what a political enemy is doing ??? I don't think they're supposed to do that ... but I'm not a lawyer.

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#67
post #62

[deleted]

What would be the benefit of being a political party? If we want HN to become a political power (and I am not saying we do), then it seems like a more productive approach is to become a lobby like the EFF/ACLU/NRA/etc.

Becoming a political party means that we would need to have a stance on every issue. Being a lobby means we can focus on the issues that we know about and care about.

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#69
post #62

[deleted]

Rather. Hackers political values, as stated in the jargon file, have politics:

"Formerly vaguely liberal-moderate, more recently moderate-to-neoconservative (hackers too were affected by the collapse of socialism). There is a strong libertarian contingent which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. The only safe generalization is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian; thus, both paleoconservatism and ‘hard’ leftism are rare. Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day."

Mapping this to any political ideology would be difficult.

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the letter: http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/11/16/magazine/16Lede2/m...

If you read that document carefully, you can see that the EFF edited one of passages that they quoted and did not mention their edit, which is a big no-no. The original letter says: (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant. which the EFF quoted as (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance).

I expect that was accidental, but I agree it should be fixed (either corrected in brackets, or the original with a [sic]).
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