You really got to give it to Western Cultures for the sheer hypocrisy and double-standards whimsically thrown around at world events. Just a few months ago, every freedom loving government was all about the Iranian protesters using social networking platforms to co-ordinate their dissent against their repressive regime.
Now that the has occurred on our home soil, guess what! It's a matter that requires the FBI and other federal powers to crush under their jacked boots. How dare people use the very tool we cheerleaded Iranians using, Twitter, in an effort to exercise their First Amendment Rights.
Woe be to the American citizen who believes they do not live under the repression of Iran, for illegitimate Iranian government's version of rule of law has come to our shores.
Arrest Puts Focus on Protesters’ Texting
By COLIN MOYNIHAN
Published: October 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/...
As demonstrations have evolved with the help of text messages and online social networks, so too has the response of law enforcement.
On Thursday, F.B.I. agents descended on a house in Jackson Heights, Queens, and spent 16 hours searching it. The most likely reason for the raid: a man who lived there had helped coordinate communications among protesters at the Group of 20 summit in Pittsburgh.
The man, Elliot Madison, 41, a social worker who has described himself as an anarchist, had been arrested in Pittsburgh on Sept. 24 and charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime. The Pennsylvania State Police said he was found in a hotel room with computers and police scanners while using the social-networking site Twitter to spread information about police movements. He has denied wrongdoing.
Mr. Stolar said that the reason for the Jackson Heights raid would not be clear until an affidavit used to secure the search warrant was unsealed. But he said that commentary among agents indicated that it was related to Mr. Madison’s arrest in Pittsburgh, where he participated in the Tin Can Comms Collective, a group of people who collected information and used Twitter to send mass text messages describing protest-related events that they observed on the streets.
First off, he is being charged with hindering prosecution, possessing criminal instruments, and running an illegal communication facility. These trump up charges are suggesting that by broadcasting the activities of the police somehow hindered the prosecution of people who were involved in illegal activities, mainly window smashing.
This is going to be a pickle to make stick since the state will have to prove the intent of the messages was to evade arrest and not avoid areas that the Pittsburgh Police were treating like downtown Tehran. The side coleslaw to this laughable charge is that the police themselves were issuing the exact same warnings in public broadcasts, online, as a feed. Yes, as a public feed as a public service.
Anyone state lawyer stupid enough to level this charge in court should set aside money to payout the civil suit against the city/state/federal government soon to follow.
If it is illegal to live stream the actions of police to other citizens, then every broadcast network who covered the G20 crackdown by the mullahs of Pittsburgh is also subject to the same criminal action. Any report who Twittered during the conference is also subject to "disappearing" by the Pittsburgh police and/or FBI.
The really sad clown crying for democracy and right to free assembly is that Elliot Madison was arrested before the breaking of windows by knucklehead hipster protesters had even occurred. So even if the Stazi of Pennsylvania could somehow justify detaining a citizen and depriving them of their basic civil liberty to dissent, they got the timestamps all wrong and they know it.
This is about stifling dissent and a further erosion of our right to free assembly. They did not get all Ahmadinejad on their fellow American citizens because they felt they were helping suspects flee prosecution, the Pittsburgh Police and the FBI did it to for control.
Control of the masses, against the masses, in the name of the masses.
Just swap out anarchist black for Iranian green, and the utter hypocrisy that is the American police state is made painfully apparent.
Twit that.
While you still can.