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TSA Withdraws Subpoenas Against Bloggers
wwphx writes "In the wake of public outcry against the Transportation Security Administration for serving civil subpoenas on two bloggers, the government agency has canceled the legal action and apologized for the strong-arm tactics agents used."
. . . but someone should have to fall on his or her sword over this. If those field agents acted on their own, it would be they; if not, then whoever they worked for that authorized the tactics should be holding a sign saying "WILL WAND YOUR CROTCH FOR FOOD."
in my mind is: Did they stop legal action against him because they FOUND the source of the leak?
It sounds like they knew they wouldn't find anything, so a few "accidental" drops to the laptop was their preferred interrogation method. While I do find this works sometimes on PC's, it rarely works on a laptop.
It sounds like they were looking to punish him for posting it, rather than actually looking for information.
At one company I worked for, we received a few computers from Europe. They had been shipped separately, just because that's how they arrived for shipment. One showed up at our office in pieces. The pieces appeared ok, but not a single part worked. I'm pretty sure they thought we were smuggling something inside the computer. Come on, was it necessary to remove and manhandle the motherboard, just to see that it didn't contain any drugs? We didn't get an apology, nor reimbursement for it. the US Customs stance was, "That's the way we got it, when we inspected it.". Ya, right.
Consistency is not in their methodology though. We shipped a lot of equipment around to various locations. Most got there fine. The occasional piece was mishandled by the shipping companies. Some were held for weeks by customs. It makes it hard to work, when you ship say 20 pieces, and only 15 show up on time.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.