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Journalist Burned Alive In India For Facebook Post Exposing Corruption
arnott writes: Journalist Jagendra Singh used a Facebook page to expose corruption in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India. Though he posted under a pseudonym, he was quickly found and burned alive by police, allegedly on the order of the minister accused. He died a week later from his injuries. This is not the first case of a journalist being attacked in this state. Amnesty International had urged the local government to launch an official investigation, and now five policemen and a politician have been brought up on murder charges. What can Facebook or other companies do to help these journalists report on corruption in a safe manner?
Perhaps India should look into the US 2nd amendment. Moral majority prefer better living conditions for everyone, corruption apposes that, be messy but the smart money is on the masses.
It's not up to Facebook to do anything, other than comply with the applicable laws of the country they're located in. If the company inserted itself into a local and controversial political problem, then it could be putting its own employees at risk.
Breaking news: Organized crime runs the world.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This is exactly why strong encryption is a non-negotiable right. Without it, you'll be killed for your words, opinions and beliefs.
A journalist who thought that he would be anonymous on Facebook? Really? His intentions may have been good, but I'm inclined to doubt his perspicacity.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Indias legal excecutive is basically "Judge Dredd" in real-life. Courts are so behind, murder investigations and convictions can take up to 25 years before even starting. The police solve this on their own to maintain order by staging "encounters" for people who've killed more than once. They basically find you, arrest you for something petty they can pin on you and then shoot you for resisting/trying to flee.
With such factually absolute powers for the police, they're bound to turn corrupt.
I'd say it's no surprise that in such a system an exposure of police corruption get's you killed mafia style.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Wow, that didn't long for the irrelevant anti-US swipe, just 5 posts. This has jack-squat to do with the US, you know. Isn't this brown-skinned people oppressing other brown-skinned people? Can't deal with that truth though, so let's make an obligatory mention of the "evil" US.. And if you'd care to look at real statistics, cops don't routinely kill "innocent" people; incidents have occurred, yes, but it's certainly not a matter of policy or even general practice. The media might have you think otherwise, but they promote the hell out of sensational dirt, it's good for their bottom line, which is all they really care about.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Nothing, nor should they.
Providing a venue for making anonymous accusations against other people is not Facebook's job, and is the opposite of Facebook's stated policies.
...What can Facebook or other companies do to help these journalists report on corruption in a safe manner?...
For starters, they need to want to do something to help. Just because someone happens to post on a Facebook webpage, does that put the onus on Facebook automatically to protect that journalist? Probably not.
.
So it then comes down to Facebook actively wanting to provide such a mechanism for journalists.
Will Facebook want to do that?
Probably not, as Facebook appears to be more interested in tracking people than providing posting sanctuaries for journalists.
to sum up! government in US kill people in their homeland (cops killing innocent people) as well as abroad (bombing Middle East).
So you think governments are the same everywhere?
That's painting with a broad brush.
Please tell me more about Monaco's bombing campaigns. I'm also curious about police killings in Iceland. Or Switzerland.
...since facebook and sidekicks already subdued to their overlord the mighty security services of the USA. Thus making it harder to find out who posts truth will work against the non encryption, non security policy in front of NSA, FBI, etc...
> What can Facebook or other companies do to help these journalists report on corruption in a safe manner?
Not being a company that profiles its users (and anyone else) for the purpose of advertisement and trading with that data?
It is not beneficial towards anonymity to put a price tag on privacy.
Even though he went by an alias on Facebook, he did post his own picture on the account. I don't think he was even seriously trying to conceal who he was; he probably didn't expect the corrupt official to take such a drastic step. Given that case, there's nothing that Facebook can do in this kind of situation.
Or was that the point.
That rely on the practices of this government to make a buck for the shareholders.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Should add... if you actually read the article, the "pseudonym" he was posting under was nothing more than the title of "Shahjahanpur (City) News" with his photograph right there on it. He just setup a second Facebook account act as a news feed.
Plus there's murder charges in this case in India...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
How often do you have to angry-post on the internet to repress all that cognitive dissonance?
Nor does France, Switzerland nor Norway.
No more burning alive happens in these places than in the USA.
So the evidence is against the 2nd amendment being anything to do with your "safety".
If you're not very careful with your security, you might get burned.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
This is why we need encryption, this is why we need tools like Tor, Truecrypt, GPG.
Security is not police officers in full body armor and heavy weaponry, it's privacy and anonymity.
Try that shit in the US where I have multiple concealed weapons. They try jumping me on the street because they didn't like my Facebook post, they're taking bullets to the head. I'm fairly certain guns are practically banned in most of India and this is probably why. They want only the rich and corrupt in power to have guns.
I'm not trolling. I'm just saying that if people at least had a chance at protecting themselves the "police" in this situation might think twice.
I found his Facebook page. Not only did he have his photo, but his full name on the page as well. If posting under your real name counts as a pseudonym, then I guess I'm posting under a pseudonym as well. *sits back confident that nobody will EVER guess my real name*
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Surely there could have been smarter ways to go about this than further solidifying the point that he was making...
Bing, there it is, the $10 "cognitive dissonance".. that didn't take long either. We're on a roll today.
Better question: how often do we have to see irrelevant posts that serve only to promote a poster's favorite hate obsession? Simply put, this happened in India, not the US. It would seem all roads of negativity lead back to the US. It gets old, that's all.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Facebook has a policy against creating fake accounts or using false information.
Not saying this journalist should have regarded Facebook's policies as more important than his own security, but Facebook is not a platform for anonymity and I doubt even incidents like this will change their mind. It will probably just result in being told "then don't use Facebook for that purpose".
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
The U.S. is only a stones throw away from such behaviour. In the U.S. anybody can be classed as a terrorist and killed or locked up indefinitely without trial. The U.S. lackey the U.K. has never been a democracy and just dreams of bullying and killing its neighbour Ireland. Or has public school bum fucking wet dreams of sticking it up 7 year old sambo, from the Commonwealth. Although they would much prefer colonies. Oh and where did India get democracy. Dam Coolies what!
Nothing.
It is up to local checks and balances to meaningfully protect their journalists and combat corruption in whatever form it may take. And, let there be a local population that will take a stand for such measures rather than appeal to the corporation.
If a system requires the brutality and death of journalist or more open-speaking critics so that checks and balances occur, that is more a question of how local governments of those systems can improve in meaningful ways.
If Facebook or any other corporation do take measures, even while appearing to protect journalists, it may also create an element of noise wherein the voices and opinions being expressed may become suppressed or unheard.
Furthermore, while trying to protect freedom of speech or press, we all may see such measures as acceptable, but when faced with court orders to lift anonymity in face of copyright or some other investigative effort... Let's say that there are some amongst us that just won't care about journalists as much as their bottom line.
The problem is to broad for corporate policy to adequately address.
Anyone else care to accuse me of corruption? ...didn't think so. Glad we were able to clear that up.
Why is it Facebook's responsibility?
100% Anonymity is likely not possible. Besides there are already places like Wikileaks to try for better anonymity when 'exposing corruption'. You don't really have 100% anonymity in 'meat space' what makes anyone think there would be 100% anonymity online. The tools are there to help protect someone's identity but nothing like this will be foolproof. Besides why is the question about what 'Facebook & others can do about helping to protect anonymity' and not about 'what can Facebook & others do to influence governments to protect their citizens from corrupt officials'...if for instance Facebook is going to promote Internet.org in India & elsewhere how about tying any support there to 'cleaning up your rampant corruption'. Any 'protest' should be about the killing of the individual not about protecting his anonymity.
Consider that if the Journalist in question was a 'she' & 'she was raped' there'd be world-wide public outcry about not protecting "women's rights"...Men are not disposable & there should be world-wide outrage around this guys death re: 'systemic violence against men'.
So you kill your own comment by your hyperbole. Just like some feminists calling "He asked me if I wanted a coffee: it was rape!" kill their own claims by their hyperbole.
The imbalance of divorce and parenthood is inevitable given that for much of the legal history, mostly men made the money, therefore the woman wouldn't have any money to look after kids, and the father not enough time to look after the kids. It should and must be changed.
But it's 100% NOT RAPE.
Stop being a whiny bitch.
That's unheard of!
http://www.damninteresting.com...
Unless you count the thousands of still-living people there that have been declared legally dead by bribed public officials and stripped of their property.
Dear "Linux Torvalds" you seem to be history impaired.
If anyone outside country needs to be blamed for what's wrong in India, that would be the British. And also the Mughals, for that matter.
I know it won't help your reading comprehension problem to point this out, but the article is about something that happened in India.
There's nothing Facebook can do. There were probably only maybe 5 people who were capable of posting what he posted and "they" probably already knew about all of them and just narrowed it down to this guy somehow (or maybe the killed the others as well.)
It's like if your wife posts something under a pseudonym exposing your habit of leaving your socks on the floor.
It seems like people in India like to set people on fire. Mostly women though
Facebook will do nothing, because they are PART of the corruption, both in India and in every other country where it wields influence (including the USA - just look at the passage of TPA last week, which will allow Facebook and other companies to bring in unlimited cheap labor via the TPP and accompanying treaties).
I went through a divorce. It's a 50/50 split all right, except for one thing. The bulk of my possessions was my IRA, which easily dwarfed everything else I had. My financial advisor told her that if it was removed, it would incur heavy penalties. Since she had started working much later than I had, or more precisely, after the dotcom bubble burst, my IRA easily dwarfed hers, but we agreed not to touch it. We did manage to split everything 50/50, which was that I kept the things I can't touch until 20 years from now, while she got almost all the fluid assets - cash and everything.
Yeah, 50/50 sounds fair, until one actually has to execute the division
A corrupt official, or just a fan of Game of Thrones?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"innocent" being Aryan-code for "white".
Unfortunately your local government might call for freedom in external states, they rarely want it for their own subjects. GLWT
Make a little plan Sam. Seriously one needs to get out of the place before releasing a report. Encrypt it and send it into a trusted nation . Destroy any materials that you have in hand and take a long vacation to the elsewhere.
Facebook could make sure all of your personal information is kept very safe and confidential, and only made available to anyone who claims to be an advertiser wanting to 'target' you.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
This makes, having the administration sic the IRS on your non-profit, look benign.
Just what they're doing now - serving as the medium for conscientious journalists and other concerned individuals to publish accounts of the bullshit going on in their corner of the world. Anonymity is tough, but it can be attained for such purposes. Such techniques should not be the responsibility of Facebook. And yes, anonymity tends to dampen credibility, so there's a balancing act to be performed if one wants to avoid the violent response of the corrupt little men being exposed, but let us give thanks that there there are those willing to take such risks for the sake of truth.
Challenge them then: make it real.
1. Find any brown-ish turban-ish folk bitching outside your embassies.
2. Offer to leave a handful of US passports in thei names, including wives, children, etc. and DARE them not to pick it up.
3. Film it.
No poor folk I have ever met pass this test. I would'nt either.
It isn't a matter of how important the journalist thinks FB's policies are, it is a matter of him posting in a place and in a manner that would give away his identity when he has no reason to believe that they wouldn't.
Facebook makes no claims to protect users from being discovered. Quite the opposite, really. They are very upfront about the fact that they want you to be identifiable.
I can only believe that this journalist either was unaware that it would go this far, or that he was willing to risk his life to make sure it got to a larger audience. He may have believed that he'd piss them off, but just have normal harassment, which may have been an acceptable cost for him to improve his standing as a journalist and the visibility of his story.
She got the goldmine, I got the shaft...
That is just common sense these days.
Wow, that didn't long for the irrelevant anti-US swipe, just 5 posts. This has jack-squat to do with the US, you know. Isn't this brown-skinned people oppressing other brown-skinned people? Can't deal with that truth though, so let's make an obligatory mention of the "evil" US.. And if you'd care to look at real statistics, cops don't routinely kill "innocent" people; incidents have occurred, yes, but it's certainly not a matter of policy or even general practice. The media might have you think otherwise, but they promote the hell out of sensational dirt, it's good for their bottom line, which is all they really care about.
0. Concur OP was kinda ridiculous.
1. The US has brown-skinned people too.
2. Concur that killing innocent people isn't a matter of policy, but it is much less clear how routine or common it may be. A part of that is statistics (routine across a lots of cops each day, so not routine for individual cops) and a part is obscured by the playbook (a culture which hates a cop who doesn't back up another cop, unions which care more about defending their members than about whether their members are murderers, and the press double-standard of releasing the record of praising or defending the cop while condemning the dead and noting all of the dead's criminal history.
3. Fundamental problem is the lack of good whistleblower channels and protections. Those are missing in the United States the same way they are missing in India.
...government in US kill people in their homeland (cops killing innocent people)...
If you think this is any sort of "official policy", even remotely, a simple google search will correct that ignorance.
...as well as abroad (bombing Middle East).
Well, the terrorists were targeting the US; now they are targeting each other. Not ideal, but, hey, they need to kill somebody!
to sum up! ...
You are silly.
- X/Y -
This is another case of people barely knowing how to use Facebook and having no clue of how to use the rest of the web/internet.
Michael Hastings.
WAKE UP.
Uh huh. Right.
This is called a fake encounter. This guy is a Rajput. Rajputs are designated as forward caste. It's like being a white male in the USA, "drop dead you are on your own".
Fake encounters are used to browbeat the Sikh community. It happens to young men who "take Amrit" to become initiated into the Khalsa. A little reading up on the Khalsa is in order. It's like the Jesuits for the Roman Catholic Church...and a whole lot more. To them, the Second Amendment is part of their religion. I welcome them to the USA (grin city).
Treason within a group is a universal. KPS* Gill was the Director General of Police in Punjab. He was effective in killing Sikhs in whatever ideological flavor that he did not like.
* (sic) When he spoke of various organizations approving of the production, release and distribution of the movie Sadda Haq, he called for the Shromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee to "cut the word 'S'" from its name. IMHO, his conduct has "cut the word 'S' (Singh)" from his name.
Is your real name Jason Bourne? Given the moniker you use and all... I am sure that is it!
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Every one of the perps should have one of their limbs burned, in addition to a jail term.
Your name is Adam Levine isn't it? I got you now, boy!
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