Declan McCullagh wrote:
I guess Declan must feel that as long as it's James Dalton Bell, and his elderly parents, who are the only likely victims of the anal plungering such comments engender, that it's great journalistic fun to put "Cypherpunk Terrorist Vows Revenge" articles at the top of Wired News to celebrate Bell's release from coercive mistreatment at the hands of the state apparatus.
That wasn't the headline, and in any case I don't write headlines for my articles.
Since I said "articles," which is plural, and each article has its own headline, I think it should be clear to the clueful reader that the single descriptive phrase "Cypherpunk Terrorist Vows Revenge" was an opinion of the tone of the articles, as opposed to their actual captions. My apologies if this was unclear.
If anyone was in a position to object to the article -- which you seem to think is unfair to Bell -- it was in fact Bell, and he did not.
I'm not sure Bell is the arbiter of how well the articles you wrote address the real issues of the case. Bell could very well be happy with endless articles talking about himself, and saying nothing about the issues, and this would not suggest that Bell was all-important and the issues were not. I quite frankly find it embarrassing that the US government's search for genuine terrorists has gone so poorly that it must manufacture them from tax protestors who live at home with their elderly parents, and itinerant musicians with Tourette's Syndrome. Add to this government shills screaming in mock horror that a chemist was actually found in possession of (gasp) Nitric Acid, and I think an article which doesn't at least question how much the taxpapers are being billed for this expensive continuing circus, and for what degree of protection against what probable terrorist acts, kind of misses its mark. Granted, your articles don't rise to the level of the US News and World Report distortion of the Bell case, which deliberately gave the impression that early concerns over Bell's rights being violated were misplaced, and that in retrospect, the government saved us all from destruction at Bell's hands in a massive terrorist attack by arresting him just in the nick of time. Nonetheless, I think you could have done a better job of shining light on the more sordid aspects of the government's case, the harmlessness of Bell, and pointing that the charges against Bell were place-holders for the real goal of intimidating him into not continuing to exercise his First Amendment rights in ways the government didn't like. The US Government claims it has no political prisoners, because the law books of the United States have no purely political crimes. Of course this is false, and political prisoners in the United States are simply convicted of non-political crimes, with evidence of their political acts being introduced to poison the outcome of their trials, after which exceptional sentences are imposed, again using their political acts as justification. Pulling such antics off is not particularly hard. You just need enough laws to ensure that everyone is guilty of something, in case they rock the boat and need to be dealt with. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"