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Can someone give us some context here?


The US Government Keeps Harassing a UW Researcher Who Speaks for WikiLeaks:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430090

Basically, a University of Washington researcher associated with WikiLeaks is detained for several hours without reason every time he goes through a US airport. He goes by 'ioerror' here and on Twitter, among other places.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum

See, for example, the section titled, "Investigation and Detainment".


See previous discussions: "The US Government Keeps Harassing a UW Researcher Who Speaks for WikiLeaks" this guy "Jacob Appelbaum" is ioerror.

   - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430090
   - http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/obsessed-with-jacob/Content?oid=7560624


...context needs to come beyond the previous hacker news threads and what has already been said.

CBP can be pretty terrible (I'm a foreigner living in the US and I've personally been on the end of their interrogation myself) but really we need FULL context of Jake's detainment before we jump to too many conclusions.

We still don't know:

1) Whether he has committed/suspected of committing/claimed to have committed any further or specific acts that would give CBP reason and justification for detainment.

2) Whether during detention Jake has been particularly provocative/inflammatory to CBP officers - which is only going to cause more delay and less expectation to fair treatment.

His tweets regarding him conversing with CBP officers who have personally served in Iraq seemed insensitive and inflammatory.

Regardless of your position on USA in Iraq, being disrespectful to people who have served in the Iraq seems counter-productive. I'm not a US citizen, I'm not pro-war in Iraq but one could empathize they probably feel betrayed by wikileaks and concerned for the security of their colleagues still in the warzone. My point is if the task at hand is to get out of that room and into freedom, some tact and decency in such a situation wouldn't go amiss rather than making personally inflammatory remarks about their serving of their (and his) country.



Here's yesterday's thread on "The US Government Keeps Harassing a UW Researcher Who Speaks for WikiLeaks" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430090




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