THE STUPID ... IT BURNS

You thought Mooninite panic was stupid?  Brother, you ain’t seen NOTHING yet.

Via bruce_schneier:  Boston College Campus Police: “Using Prompt Commands" May Be a Sign of Criminal Activity”

[...]  Not only is there no indication that any crime was committed, the investigating officer argued that the computer expertise of the student itself supported a finding of probable cause to seize the student’s property.

The warrant application cites the following allegedly suspicious behavior:

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“Oh my g0dz0rz.  This COMPUTER SCIENCE MAJOR knows an OS that isn’t Windows.  He must be a computer criminal.”

WTF is wrong with these people?  I didn’t think even college rent-a-cops could be that stupid. 

HELLO?  UNIVERSITY?  COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT?

  Isn’t imparting computer expertise, like, the computer science department’s REASON TO EXIST?  If computer expertise is evidence of wrongdoing, better arrest the entire CS faculty, because they must be even guiltier.  And how about that NSA?

Aside from the remarkable overreach by campus and state police in trying to paint a student as suspicious in part because he can navigate a non-Windows computer environment, nothing cited in the warrant application could possibly constitute the cited criminal offenses.  There are no assertions that a commercial (i.e. for pay) commercial service was defrauded, a necessary element of any “Obtaining computer services by Fraud or Misrepresentation” allegation.  Similarly, the investigating officer doesn’t explain how sending an e-mail to a campus mailing list might constitute “unauthorized access to a computer system.”

During its March 30th search, police seized (among other things) the computer science major’s computers, storage drives, cell phone, iPod Touch, flash drives, digital camera, and Ubuntu Linux CD.  None of these items have been returned.  He has been suspended from his job pending the investigation.  His personal documents and information are in the hands of the state police who continue to examine it without probable cause, searching for evidence to support unsupportable criminal allegations.

This is ... barking insanity.  The degree of paranoia here is beyond belief.  What happened, terrorists snuck in and dumped a thousand gallons of liquid stupid into the campus’ water supply?

"One of the worst hatchet jobs ever perpetrated on the viewing public"

That’s just the beginning of what Massad Ayoob had to say about ABC’s 20/20 special “If I Only Had A Gun”:

To make the point that an armed citizen would stand no chance against a single psycho gunman, the show engineered a totally “set ‘em up to fail” scenario in which some college kids were outfitted with Simunitions™ Glocks, which fired paintballs.  After limited familiarization, which apparently did not include drawing the guns from concealment, the kids were outfitted with safety-strap and SERPA security holsters that they obviously hadn’t adequately learned how to draw from.  These were then concealed under long white T-shirts that went down below their backsides, and clung tightly to the holstered pistols.  When a trained firearms instructor playing the role of the psycho entered the classroom and started shooting, the kids in the good guy role might as well have been wearing strait jackets.  The “gunman” also seemed to know before hand who would have the concealed weapons, because he zoomed right in on them.  They didn’t have a chance.

(Nonetheless, one bad guy role-player, an honest cop, was hit by a female student’s paintball bullet and went down.  She had obviously stopped the killing.  However, in the subsequent interview and reconstruction, Ms. Sawyer managed to spin this into the armed rescuer being killed and the bad guy only wounded.)

[...]

Kudos to Leslie Stahl, “60 Minutes,” and CBS for having the integrity to show both sides of a complicated issue.  By contrast, ABC’s latest “20/20” outing with Diane Sawyer should be used in journalism school to show the students how degrading it is to their profession to disguise blatantly deceptive propaganda as an impartial news program.