Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I'll refrain from calling you names, as you've characterized LutzSed, but just point out the fact that it the FBI that's the problem. They've been violating the rights of Americans, and spying on us all, for their own reasons, not because they were trying to protect us, since they were formed. There's no hope of curtailing their activities, especially now that we have the big Radical Muslem scare, and a congress full of right wing reactionaries and cowards.
LutzSec isn't bringing on anything, it's already here.
you're not paranoid if they're really out to get you.
but, when the conspiracy is shown to be real, i have nothing but venom and hate for the power abusing assholes who think they can get away with it
hoover was a cross-dressing pinhead (not that there's anything wrong with cross-dressing, but there's plenty wrong with hypocrisy). the fbi under him was an extension of mccarthy era hysteria and witch hunts. so fuck you hoover, thanks for contributing to the destruction of the composure of a great man and a great writer
those who seek to protect us, in the name of hypocritical assumptions about what we need protection from, are the real enemies of the usa
down with them all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
He was bipolar, with paranoid delusions most amplified during mixed episodes (happy and not happy psychosis in the same package -- a bad trip).
And you're right, that he was a manic depressive with persecutory delusions and that he was indeed being spied upon by law enforcement doesn't mean he wasn't nuts -- obviously the case in Hemingway's case. Maybe it was self-fulfilling.
Calling out bogus battery capacity claims.
With just a touch of exaggeration, I'll say that any public intellectual in that era who didn't have an FBI file probably was lacking a conscience. Einstein had a 1500-page FBI file, having aroused Hoover's suspicion with his involvement in "communist front" organizations like the American Crusade Against Lynching. America had been through the worst era of unrestrained robber-baron capitalism, followed by the Great Depression. It was the height of Jim Crow. If you were engaged in the intellectual life of the country, it was very likely that you were either going to become a socialist or some other kind of radical. Just to pick two more random examples: Margaret Sanger and Helen Keller were both leftists, and both had FBI files. American leftists were the only ones who spoke up against Fascism in Spain and tried to do anything about it -- at a time when right-wingers were often huge fans of Mussolini. For a lot of folks on the left, the big disillusionment came in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Find free books.
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:
For now I think there's quite a bit more value in pursuing the CEOs than the
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();