
Jacob Appelbaum detained at U.S. border, questioned about Wikileaks - Rod
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20012253-245.html
======
Niten
_> [...] when he was pulled aside by customs and border protection agents who
told him he was randomly selected for a security search

> [...] Receipts from his bag were photocopied and his laptop was inspected
> but it's not clear in what manner, the sources said. Officials from the
> Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Army then told him he was
> not under arrest but was being detained, the sources said. They asked
> questions about Wikileaks, asked for his opinions about the wars in Iraq and
> Afghanistan and asked where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is, but he
> declined to comment without a lawyer present, according to the sources. He
> was not permitted to make a phone call, they said._

What's more worrisome to me is that doublespeak like nonrandom "random
searches" and "not arrested but detained" — not to mention state officials
imprisoning citizens and holding them up to some political litmus test over
their opinions of our foreign wars while searching through their documents and
confiscating their equipment without a warrant — has apparently become such a
norm in the USA that even more open-minded news sources like Wired don't
bother to question it.

~~~
pvg
Immigration and Customs officials don't need a warrant to detain you
(temporarily), search you, ask your questions or seize some or all of your
luggage. This has always been the established norm as it is on the
(controlled) borders of just about any country.

~~~
Niten
Even to the extent that this is currently the norm, why is it _OK_?

Why should state officials ever be allowed to interrogate U.S. citizens'
political opinions, regardless of whether those citizens happen to be standing
in an airport?

It makes perfect sense that Customs be allowed to inspect physical items
passengers bring through the airport, but what rationale says they should look
through your computer files, especially in a post-Internet world? (I.e.,
there's no sense in claiming that you'll stop child pornography or other hot-
topic illegal data entering the U.S. in an age where the Internet exists.)

~~~
pvg
Why is what OK? For law-enforcement personnel to ask you questions? Or search
you? Both of these are established and legal and common. Saying they shouldn't
be able to search your laptop because of the Internet is like suggesting
police shouldn't check suspects in violent crimes for knives because of the
availability of guns. Instead of making more vague regulations about what you
can and can't be asked at the border, there is a very simple remedy for
government agents asking you questions you don't want to answer - simply not
answering. That's a legal right Jacob Appelbaum had no trouble taking
advantage of.

------
Gianteye
I wonder if this is part of a policy to try and debase wikileaks by making it
clear that if you affiliate with them or support them that life will be made
hard for you.

I know Jake. I was a member of Noisebridge. I feel the work that Wikileaks is
doing is incredibly important, and I know he's got the fortitude to deal with
the bullshit and continue fighting the good fight.

~~~
rick888
Wikileaks may be important, but they should really think of the consequences
of their actions:

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/7...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/7917955/Wikileaks-
Afghanistan-Taliban-hunting-down-informants.html)

If any death results from this "leak", Jake should be held accountable.

~~~
Rod
Who has the moral authority to hold Jake accountable? He exposed the truth. By
contrast, Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld gave us Gulf of Tonkin II, the meretricious
congressmen gave the executive branch all the power it wanted, we know that we
invaded a country based on lies, 100,000s have died, and noone has been held
accountable. What's the rule here? You kill 1 it's a tragegy, but if you kill
1,000,000 it's a statistic?

~~~
rick888
"Who has the moral authority to hold Jake accountable? He exposed the truth.
By contrast, Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld gave us Gulf of Tonkin II, the
meretricious congressmen gave the executive branch all the power it wanted, we
know that we invaded a country based on lies, 100,000s have died, and noone
has been held accountable. What's the rule here? You kill 1 it's a tragegy,
but if you kill 1,000,000 it's a statistic?"

So you claim nobody has the "moral authority" to hold the people from
wikileaks accountable, yet you want to hold Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld
accountable (it's interesting you would use only republicans as examples btw)
for their actions?

If I intentionally gave out your address to criminals and told them when you
wouldn't be home (and they robbed your house), would you hold me accountable?
I'm just "exposing the truth"

This information has the possibility of getting thousands killed. On a side
note, I'm hoping I can get jake's full address and phone number so I can give
it out to some people. I'm sure he won't mind. I'm just "exposing the truth"

~~~
rick888
"Perhaps I'm just out of touch, but I normally would put most of the
responsibility for these things on the warring parties. Blaming a third party
that doesn't have an army, a militia, or guns seems self-serving or
disingenuous, depending on who's doing it."

I'm not blaming Wikileaks for those things. As you say, they don't have an
army. What they do have is a very large audience. Just like with a militia (or
owning a gun), you need to be responsible. Giving out the names of potential
informants and spies is not being responsible.

If there was even a chance that people could die as a result of this
information, they shouldn't have gone public. Because they did, it leads me to
believe that they are being driven by an anti-war political agenda.

To me, the information given is not worth the number of lives that will be
lost as a result.

~~~
gloob
"To me, the information given is not worth the number of lives that will be
lost as a result."

Fair enough; that's an honest disagreement. My perspective on the matter is
simply that whatever the number of deaths that Wikileaks will hypothetically
be responsible for, the American government and Taliban are each responsible
for a hundred times as many. I do a little introspection and realized that I'm
not all that outraged about the actions of the American government with
respect to Afghanistan and Iraq[0], so I can't bring myself to be upset about
something that is a drop in the bucket (not to mention indirect, rather than
direct, responsibility) in comparison.

Clarification: I am not suggesting that you either disagree or agree with the
position I present here. I'm just presenting it.

[0] To spell it out: Afghanistan started their war by knowingly allowing al
Qaeda to plan and train for the September 11 attacks in Afghanistan. The
American invasion is therefore a retaliation, and not a war of aggression, so
fair enough. My feelings on the war in Iraq are that it was a waste of time,
effort, lives, and money, and was driven by the American and British
governments knowingly and intentionally deceiving their publics. If the
country I live in had tagged along for the ride, I would be rather upset about
the situation, but if some foreign government wants to self-harm it's not my
problem.

~~~
Rod
_"I do a little introspection and realized that I'm not all that outraged
about the actions of the American government with respect to Afghanistan and
Iraq."_

If you don't live in Russia nor China, what makes you think that the U.S.
won't converge towards tyranny at some point in the future and start using
their fantastic military machine to invade countries at will, building an
empire that neither Napoleon nor Hitler could even dream of? If that sounds
impossible, let us not forget that Germany in the 1920s was quite different
from Germany in the 1930s.

I remember the huge demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq in Europe in
early 2003. Hundreds of thousands of people protesting in Barcelona. The
biggest protests since Vietnam. And, then, one year later, the Madrid metro
bombings "forcefully" convince the vastly anti-war Spanish electorare that it
was intolerable to have a handful of troops in Iraq. Just because you don't
live in the U.S. nor the U.K. do not rule out the possibility that you might
suffer the consequences of the reckless invasion of Iraq.

------
gruseom
It would be a good thing if more prominent people became associated with
Wikileaks and diluted the one-man-show aspect. It's the principles that
matter.

Interesting that FBI agents at Defcon said they wanted to know if "human
rights" were being "trampled". Is that a clumsy way of establishing rapport
with the subject, or are there actually FBI agents who think like that?

~~~
quadhome
One of the best parts of Defcon is the opportunity to party with feds all
night long. You discover they're just like you.

~~~
substack
Can any individual government agent in such a capacity ever really be "just
like me"? I don't take orders from anyone. They do. In that respect, they are
nothing like me at all.

A large part of what makes tales of government harassment like this one so
troubling is how similar, reasonable, and even pleasant the agents are. If
they are just like us, then why is there so much injustice?

~~~
jacquesm
> If they are just like us, then why is there so much injustice?

Politics.

------
rick888
I hope that when there are discussions about the "drug war" in the US in the
future, that people blame the cartels for murders and not the fact that drugs
are illegal.

After all, the government isn't the one doing the shooting. This seems to be
the defense of the Wikileaks guys.

