At 03:37 PM 7/21/00 -0700, Ernest Hua wrote:
> Well, I did not see that one, so I did not complain,
>but I must say that I cannot agree with that one
>either! I think Mr. Anonymous is much more irritating when
>he hides behind anonymity, but has no trouble
>violating others' privacy, even the privacy of those
>who are only incidentally related to the scenario. This issue
>has nothing to do with majority vote; I just think
>it's wrong, even if everyone else feels otherwise. Ern
Publishing the home addresses of spooks who might be killed is one thing.
Publishing the addresses of the FBI thug who was merely saying
"We're telling you to unpublish the list of spooks,
and you'd better not publish our names either" is another -
they're not acting in some undercover capacity like drug informants
who'll get killed by the other side in the evil war they're fighting,
they're acting as bureaucrats abusing their public office
who deserve to be publicly exposed and humiliated for it,
and they're in no physical danger from JYA or the rest of us.
The Feebs have no business complaining that somebody does so anonymously,
because they demanded to be anonymous with their vague threats to JYA.
In one of John's postings, he indicated that it was only the Feeb supervisor
Special Agent Dave Marzigliano who insisted on anonymity
- the lower-level Special Agent James Castano was just passing on the
request that came from the Japanese government's request to squelch
publication.
It's still highly inappropriate for a request like this to come from a police
agency - this is a foreign policy request from another government,
so that's the job of the State Department. It might have been an FBI issue
if there was some accusation that a US law had been broken.
If the Spooky Agencies felt that US national security interests outside the US
were being violated, e.g. ratting out Japanese secret police might reveal
US spook connections, and they therefore want to ask a US journalist to
squelch distribution of a publication that's already been published,
that's a job for a polite request from them, not from a US police agency.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
