WTF?

[seawasp]

Apparently, Hugo-nominated author Peter Watts was beaten, pepper-sprayed, and arrested at the Canadian border. According to the reports available, all Watts did was get out of the car to ask about what they were doing.

He's being charged with assaulting a Federal officer (when, again according to reports, the "assault" was all on the Federal side). This is a SERIOUS charge and could land him in prison, among other things.

Comments

[j-v-lynch.livejournal.com]

What I don't understand is why (and how) the american guards stopped him on his way out.

[xyzzysqrl]

What the fricking hell?
Dropped a bit of money towards his Paypal. Can't do much right now, but ... this is just -wrong-, if all accounts are truthful. I have no reason to believe otherwise.

Huh?

[rob-thompson.livejournal.com]

I gotta say this is a confusing report. As a Canadian, I've crossed the border lots of times...been subject to search twice in 40+ years. This is a weird one, because normally, Canadians returning to Canada don't check in with the American border crossing. Which would lead one to think it was the Candian Border Services who beat on the fellow. Nevertheless, while the Americans are far - as in way out in left field - from innocent on this...I'm willing to put money on the fact that Dr. Watts - like most Canadians - hasn't figured out that the US is a different place - and mouthing off to uniformed civil servants is a "bad" idea. He, unfortunately, wouldn't be the first Canadian to discover that outside of your own country, being rude, surly and in any other way non-cooperative can end up as a painful lesson in statesemanship. I suspect the good Dr. Watt is innocent of the felony charge...I also suspect, based on watching my fellow citizens...that he was rude and obnoxious. They myth of the polite Canadian is just that - I find my fellow citizens to be far more rude, obnoxious and believing that each of them is the center of the universe to be the common case - whereas most of my American friends are far more polite and courteous to strangers.

[j-v-lynch.livejournal.com]

Cory posted that apparently there is a checpoint before the canadian border.

I wonder why.

Re: Huh?

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Speak for yourself. I have encountered power-tripping US border agents in the past, and given that experience definitely see one of these bad eggs saying "get in the car" once and then breaking out the spray. (Or taser... and they're not the only offenders there as a seance for Mr. Dziekanski would show.)

-- Steve has also witnessed highly-intrusive (and been told of destructive) searches that violate any number of civil rights.

[shanejayell.livejournal.com]

Holy fuck.

[aardy.livejournal.com]

Without having seen what happened, a technicality that may be relevant: as a legal term, "assault" means to *threaten* to harm someone, and includes both brandishing a weapon and using aggressive language. (It is "battery" that means to actually hit someone.)

Getting out of one's car, using strong language, and approaching an officer even after that officer has instructed you to stay put theoretically could very well rise to the level of "assault" if the officer then fears that your failure to obey his commands and too-obvious ire indicates that you will become violent. That doesn't excuse what the officers are accused of then doing, but it means that there's a chance the charge might be made to stick even if he can also prove that the officers were out of line or otherwise abusing their power.

[shana.livejournal.com]

I will be donating after I've had a chance to check my bank balance.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Urk, that sounds like maybe that's what's going on.

I was once on a plane flight where a passenger didn't want to go back to her seat and argued with a flight attendant, who started losing her shit because the passenger wasn't obeying her. I think the passenger came very close to getting arrested since flight attendants are supposed to have a fair amount of authority.

[seawasp]

Not just *supposed* to have it: if you listen to the boring pre-flight spiel (at least on Southwest), they make a point of telling you that FEDERAL LAW REQUIRES that you obey all orders from the aircraft crew. That includes the flight attendants. If they say get back in your seat, they have the federal muscle to back them up.

[seawasp]

Of course, his description of events doesn't seem to indicate "strong language" and "obvious ire", but failure to comply with an official command sets off all sorts of red flags, and if you're unlucky enough to have run into one of the officers who probably shouldn't be an officer, you are in serious trouble.

[murstein.livejournal.com]

This does not surprise me at all.

Then again, it was seven years ago this month, that I spent ~36 hours in continuous interrogation by tag-teaming FBI agents, who released me just after warning me that exercising my rights under the 2nd Amendment would be "a fatal mistake." The cause of this pleasantry? As near as I can figure, John Ringo blowing his stack at me on Baen's Bar, and the NSA picking it up from their surveillance of the Internet.

I'm just lucky that, when they said they'd deport me to my place of birth, I was still alert enough to remind them I was born in Akron, Ohio.

[eacole72.livejournal.com]

I forwarded the information to Anderson Cooper at CNN & Rachel Maddow at MSNBC (tried Keith Olbermann, but the email bounced), in the hopes of drawing the attention of someone from the mainstream media. CNN likes the I-report tips, so who knows.

[seawasp]

I have to wonder what the NSA is doing reading Baen's Bar, let alone taking it seriously enough to question people. I'm mildly surprised you still have contact with anyone associated with Baen (i.e., like me); many people would've assiduously avoided any such if they suspected something like THAT had been caused by such an interaction.

Me, the worst interaction I've had with any law enforcement types has been being pulled over for speeding, and that was a long time ago. Gods willing, I'll never have any more interactions with such people. I'm not at all interested in experiencing such things for myself.

[murstein.livejournal.com]

At the time, it was publicly known that the NSA was scanning all email entering and leaving the country. (At the time, at least, it was easy to have the portions of the Bar one cared about emailed, a post at a time -- therefore, one had to assume every post one made went to at least one non-US 'fly, eh?) Testimony in Federal court since then has revealed that, at major Internet nodes, everything passing through the 'net was being copied, with the copy going to on-site NSA facilities. They're not only at Fort Meade any longer.

Why was I targeted? Well, as an Amazon review tells us:

In November, 2001, Suskind writes, Vice-President Dick Cheney announced that if there was "a one percent chance" that a threat was real "we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response." He added, "It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence."

At the time, I found an odd comfort from this action. If they had the time to waste on me, they must have all the likely threats covered, too. Since Major Hasan shot up Fort Hood, I've been wondering how many other real threats are being missed, because they're wasting too much time on the easy-to-spot 1% chances.

One very valuable thing I learned from my father, is to balance differing viewpoints against each other, because nobody gets everything right. He balanced the Wall Street Journal against the left-leaning of Detroit's two major newspapers; in TV viewing, Wall Street Week In Review against the McNeil-Lehrer Report. (I forget which came on first, but he watched them both, and we discussed how the two sources gave differing interpretations of the same stories.) Since his death, I've learned that the notion there are only two competing viewpoints is incomplete. So, when I left the Bar, I was loath to cut loose connections to all 'flies, and none of the Ringo-is-God folks were on my LJ friends list.

[seawasp]

I was extremely dubious of the claim that the NSA was monitoring EVERY such communication. The volume of communication, and the computational horsepower needed to monitor it, are both staggering.

I suppose it's feasible to monitor for keywords and dump out those which have the keywords, but then you have the problem of choosing the right keywords or you're back to getting a hundred billion pieces of mail to check. In the end a human has to actually make a decision about whether a given message means something.

In any event, this sounds like the same kind of government lunacy that classified the SCA as a potential terrorist/paramilitary group. Glad you seem to have emerged from it unbroken. I dunno exactly how I'd react to such a situation; when rested and focused it's easy to keep your cool and not say anything dangerous, but after enough hours...