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Japanese Police Charge 2channel Founder Over Forum Posts
identity0 writes "According to Japan Probe, Hiroyuki Nishimura, the founder of 2ch.net, has been charged with drug offenses by Japanese police over a forum post made on 2ch in 2010. He is not even accused of making the post, but of failure to have moderators delete it. The post apparently discussed drugs. 2ch.net (also called 2channel) is Japan's biggest forum, with over a million posts a day, of which the post in question was one. The site inspired image board 2chan.net (but is not directly related to it), which spawned copycat English site 4chan.net. More info at Slashdot Japan, if you can read Japanese."
shiranakatta!
So why did the police not arrest the obvious culprits ... all those moderators, each of which failed to delete that straw in the hay stack.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
How did he piss off the police department that they are going after him like this?
In Spanish there is Barrapunto (English description).
Is that the European ideal where the UK arrests people for offensive facebook posts (indeed now has guidelines on it) and actually has no freedom of speech at all? Or Germany where they are so embarassed by the past they they would jail their own people lest they express opinions that could cause uneducated people to say bad things about Germans?
Perhaps France and their recent forays into legislating what people can wear on their heads?
Never mind our allies though (particularly some of the "other" ones like South Korea where we fought for their freedom to be jailed for insulting the government, or saudi arabia where all it takes is international pressure to show them the error of their belief that a woman who reports being gang raped should be stoned to death for admiting she had sex.... such an easy mistake to make that.)... perhaps you were thinking of the US?
You know, where we are free to have a trial as long as the president doesn't decide he doesn't want us to have one. Or where we keep plans to massively extend law enforcement authority in drawers waiting for the next disaster to push them through? Or where we ignore our own laws to ship captives out to be tortured?
Were those the sensibilities that you were looking for?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Abetting drug dealing is the crime they're claiming. They're trying to extend it to an obligation to prevent drug dealing. To abet he has to have read them and known they were real and not done anything about them.
He is not obligated to read every post and moderate those posts for possible illegality. He can't anyway, he can't know the people behind it and can't know if they are trolls or dealers, even if he bothered to read every post.
So this is a pretty shameful attempt by the Japanese police to extend a law. If they succeed it (further) decrease freedom of speech.
If the posts were for drug deals and public, then the police could have made a drug deal, and arrested the dealers. So it seems unlikely that they were in fact real drug deal posts.