FBI Wiretapped Hemingway

Hugh Pickens writes "On the fiftieth anniversary of the death by suicide of author Ernest Hemingway, his friend and biographer A. E. Hotchner writes in the NY Times that the man who 'had stood his ground against charging water buffaloes, who had flown missions over Germany, who had refused to accept the prevailing style of writing but, enduring rejection and poverty, had insisted on writing in his own unique way, this man, my deepest friend, was afraid — afraid that the FBI was after him, that his body was disintegrating, that his friends had turned on him, that living was no longer an option.' In the midst of depression and under treatment at St. Mary's Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, Hemingway was convinced that his room was bugged, his phone was tapped, and suspected that one of the interns was a fed. Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the FBI released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Hemingway under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest's activities in Cuba. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary's Hospital, making it likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all. 'In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest's fear of the FBI, which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the FBI file,' writes Hotchner, author of Papa Hemingway and Hemingway and His World. 'I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.'"

Comments

Re:Unfortunately...

[rtfa-troll]

To compare LulzSec with rapists or thugs is rediculous; comparing the CEOs to victims is so outrageous it's almost funny. There are plenty of serious "cyber" criminals who are hacking into people's systems for real money and causing real damage to people like you and me; the consumers who have their data being stored by these corporates. What makes LulzSec different is that, instead of just putting some charges on your credit card and never telling anyone where they got the data they published what they did. That's just bringing to the surface an issue which was already happening before LulzSec got involved.

LulzSec caused public nuisiance and annoyance but that makes them more stupid teenage vandals than thugs. The main bad thing they have done is embarassing the powerful and pointing out publicly what data was already available to the real black hats. It's not just that the corporates should have had better security, it's that:

• they had no right to be gathering the data they were gathering in the first place.
• if their security doesn't improve, someone sometime soon will cause real damage to all of us
• the CEOs have been lying about the level of their security; they have put their customers at risk

For now I think there's quite a bit more value in pursuing the CEOs than the