[marshray]

ioerror is Jacob Appelbaum's handle on twitter too.

I don't know anything about the site that the article is on, but it corresponds pretty closely to what I've read elsewhere.

I suppose a lot of folks probably do consider this type of extralegal harassment to be a political left/right issue. Personally I don't understand that type of thinking and suspect it's probably not useful to attempt to reason about that degree of madness.

I do believe that a lot of politicians and prominent officials are earning their place in the history books...right next to Sen Joe McCarthy in the article on 'Un-American Douchebags'.

[jbooth]

It wasn't pre-ordained that Joe McCarthy would go down in history as an un-american douchebag. He had a great ride at the top with lots of good americans saying good things about him for a while.

If noone called him out, he'd have just been another politician making hay out of fear and "the other".

[marshray]

It's true that McCarthy had a solid basis of support for his program, especially at the beginning before people saw where it was going. There were, in fact, a wide variety of leftist groups operating in America and no doubt some had a long-term vision of imposing a communist system here with the assistance of foreign powers. This was not pure fantasy - it was actually happening at a surprising rate in the late 40's and 50's.

But McCarthy & co. did more than simple fear-mongering and "making political hay". They were using the considerable power of the US Federal Govt against individuals for their politics and for not-justifiably-illegal actions. They were destroying livelihoods and putting people in jail.

It's easy to see in retrospect that the US was not at risk of the Red Tide because the economic fundamentals were absurdly better than what was needed for the leftist revolution.

McCarthy & co. degraded America and damaged our principles out of stupid hysteria and demagoguery. This only went on as long as it did because there weren't enough level-headed people who were willing to pay the price of questioning it openly.

Wikileaks/Manning/ioerror are not an existential threat to America, but this path of systematically abandoning principles of protecting individuals from the abuses of government power absolutely is.

[samfoo]

To clarify, I don't think its a left or right issue. I probably worded it wrong. The stranger is Seattle's alt-Weekly and while it typically has very good reporting, the format lends itself to sensationalism on some issues.