Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Defender of the Constitution - Andrew Cohen. The Boston bombing suspect is back in federal court to argue he has a constitutional right to speak to his lawyers without "special" restrictions on his communications. Even if you have little sympathy for Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, you ought to support his lawyers' efforts to curtail the government's sprawling use of so-called "Special Administrative Measures" in his case.
Whatever you think of him, and the capital crimes of which he stands accused, he has a right to counsel, a right to counsel who can privately and effectively communicate with him, and the Justice Department's efforts to undermine that right in this instance are unfair and perhaps even unconstitutional. First employed in 1996, SAMs are designed to prevent criminal defendants— before, during or after their trial—from inciting violence behind bars through secret communications with their lawyers or others.
Tsarnaev's Argument The Federal Response Tsarnaev's Reply Postscript. US authorities accused of intimidating associates of Chechen killed by FBI | World news. The family and supporters of an unarmed Chechen, shot in mysterious circumstances by FBI agents investigating his friendship with Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, have accused US authorities of mounting a campaign of “intimidation and harassment” against his associates. The girlfriend of Ibragim Todashev was deported at the weekend after spending two weeks at an immigration detention center in Florida.
She had already spent several months in jail for having an expired visa earlier this summer. Another friend of Todashev is also in jail. Todashev, 27, was shot on 22 May after being questioned about his friendship with Tsarnaev, one of two brothers suspected of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April that killed three spectators and injured more than 260. Several inquiries into Todashev’s death are under way. His family believe that authorities investigating the Boston bombing have unfairly targeted people close to Todashev. No Patriot Act II: Americans choose civil liberties over security laws | Harry J Enten.
Terrorist attacks offer lawmakers an ability to react. After 9/11, the American government decided to go to war in Afghanistan and to enact new laws aimed at curbing future attacks. The Patriot Act, for instance, has been regarded by some as a necessary step for safety and by others as an infringement on civil liberties. Following the Boston Marathon attack, we've heard Republicans Lindsey Graham and John McCain, among others, push for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be handled in a way that many believe would be a violation of his civil liberties. So, has the Boston bombing opened up an avenue for lawmakers to pursue controversial new anti-terrorism measures that may limit civil liberties? Almost certainly not. The latest CNN/Time/ORC poll finds that 49% of Americans are not willing to give up civil liberties in order curb terrorism, while only 40% are.
Other polls confirm these findings. The reaction to Boston has been monumentally different to the polling results after 9/11. MA Teen Arrested And Held Without Bail For Posting Supposed 'Terrorist Threat' On Facebook. I'm going to take a guess and say the national Terrorism Mood Ring is still set to 'OVERREACT' if this story is any indication. Cameron D'Ambrosio, a Methuen, MA high school student, was arrested May 1st and charged with "communicating terroristic threats" based on a Facebook posting. He is being held without bail pending a hearing on May 9th and could face up to 20 years in jail for making a "bomb threat.
" The threat (at least the one that appeared on Facebook), as reported by the Boston Herald, reads as follows. (For best results, fill in the blanks Mad Libs-style and spell "bombing" correctly.) “I’m not in reality, So when u see me (expletive) go insane and make the news, the paper, and the (expletive) federal house of horror known as the white house, Don’t (expletive) cry or be worried because all YOU people (expletive) caused this (expletive).
This was posted to D'Ambrosio's Facebook page, which looks altogether similar to thousands of teens' Facebook pages. Strange. Wow. Official: Boston bomb plot had been set for July 4th. The suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing had originally planned to strike on July 4, but chose the race because it coincided with the time they had finished assembling the explosives, a law enforcement official said Thursday. According to hospital interviews with surviving suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev shortly after he was captured, the suspects apparently finished constructing the explosives well before they had originally planned and chose to act sooner rather than wait, said the official who is not authorized to comment publicly. It was not immediately clear, however, whether the suspects had identified a specific July 4 target that corresponded with a later completion time, the official said. But the suspects allegedly settled on the marathon after noticing preparations for the race shortly before the event.
Boston hosts one of the premiere July 4 celebrations in the U.S., featuring the Boston Pops and a spectacular fireworks display on the banks of the Charles River. Investigators believe Boston bombs likely made at Tsarnaev's home. Russia Told U.S. Bomb Suspect Was Radical Islamist. Inspiration Inflation - By J.M. Berger. Have you heard the one about the English-language jihadist magazine targeting Western Muslims? No, not the Taliban's whimsically named In-Fight Magazine. And it's not Mujahedin Monthly, or Al Hussam, or Afghan Mirror, or Afghan Jihad.
And not the half-in-English Al Qaeda Airlines or Gaidi Mtaani. (And yes, those are all real things.) No, the only English-language jihadist magazine you've probably ever heard of is Inspire, and you're probably going to hear a lot more about it in the near future. NBC News reported this morning that the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, told investigators that he and his elder brother, Tamerlan, learned to build their bomb by reading Inspire, which is published by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
At this point, it doesn't really matter if NBC's report is accurate or if Tsarnaev's claim is true. Inspire was the brainchild of naturalized American citizen Samir Khan. That doesn't mean Inspire was never something to be concerned about. This Is the Modern Manhunt: The FBI, the Hive Mind and the Boston Bombers | Danger Room. Suspects 2 and 1 together. Photo: FBI In an earlier era, law enforcement might not have identified the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing so rapidly. When the smoke literally cleared on Monday, investigators had a huge problem and nearly no leads. No individual or organization claimed responsibility for the bombings that killed three and wounded more than 180.
So they took a big leap: They copped to how little they knew, and embraced the wisdom of The Crowd. Hiding in plain sight was an ocean of data, from torrents of photography to cell-tower information to locals’ memories, waiting to be exploited. But the FBI and police have been reluctant to embrace what the hive mind can provide: it implies the authorities don’t always have the answers. As of this writing, police, FBI agents, National Guardsmen and state troopers are still combing the streets of Watertown, trying to find 19-year old University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth student Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The area was filled with clues. It Wasn't Sunil Tripathi: The Anatomy of a Misinformation Disaster - Alexis C. Madrigal. How a terrible mistake falsely linking two people to the Boston bombing spread so far so fast In the middle of the last night's nearly unbelievable turn of events, for a few hours, hundreds of thousands of people received a message about the identity of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers that was painfully false.
Word got out that the Boston Police Department scanner had declared the names of the two suspects. But the names that went out over first social networks and then news blogs and websites were not Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation released early this morning. Instead, two other people wholly unconnected to the case became, for a while, two of America's most notorious alleged criminals. The story begins with speculation on Twitter and Reddit that a missing Brown student, Sunil Tripathi, was one of the bombers.
But not at first. A single tweet references Mulugeta at the time his name was said on the scanner. No one gets off easy here. Reflections on the Recent Boston Crisis. Knowing Where to Focus the Wisdom of Crowds. The F.B.I. released this surveillance video showing two men wanted for questioning in connection the Boston Marathon bombings. 11:06 a.m. | Updated Added apology from Reddit. It looks as if the theory of the “wisdom of crowds” doesn’t apply to terrorist manhunts. Last week after the Boston Marathon bombings, the Internet quickly offered to help find the people responsible. In a scene metaphorically reminiscent of a movie in which vigilantes swarm the streets with pitchforks and lanterns, people took to Reddit, the popular community and social news Web site, and started scouring images posted online from the bombings. One Reddit forum told users to search for ”people carrying black bags,” and noted that “if they look suspicious, then post them.
In the process, each time a scrap of information was discovered — the color of a hat, the type of straps on a backpack, the weighted droop of a bag — it was passed out on Twitter like “Wanted” posters tacked to lampposts. Mr. Reddit and the Marathon Bombers: The Wise Way to Crowdsource a Manhunt. After Reddit’s attempt to find the Boston Marathon bombers turned into a major failure (for which Reddit’s general manager Erik Martin publicly apologized Monday), the over-all conclusion seems to be that the whole experiment was misguided from the start, and that the Redditors’ inability to identify the Tsarnaev brothers demonstrates the futility of using an online crowd of amateur sleuths to help with a criminal investigation. Or, as the Times’s Nick Bilton put it, “It looks as if the theory of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ doesn’t apply to terrorist manhunts.”
That proposition may be true. But Reddit’s failure isn’t evidence for it. To begin with, it’s a bit facile to frame this story as a competition between “the crowd” and “the experts,” since the official investigation wasn’t relying on a couple of experts, but rather had its own crowd at work, one made up, in Bilton’s words, of “thousands of local and federal officials.” It doesn’t have to work this way, though. Photograph: F.B.I. Breaking news pragmatically: Some reflections on silence and timing in networked journalism. Speak only if it improves upon the silence.
—Mohandas Gandhi Last week’s coverage of the events in Boston showed how much the networked press needs to better understand two things: silence and timing. The Internet makes it possible for people other than traditional journalists to express themselves, quickly, to potentially large audiences. But the ideal press should be about more than this. It should be about demonstrating robust answers to two inseparable questions: Why do you need to know something now?
The broadest definition of the networked press is a system that attends to, represents, circulates, and amplifies publicly meaningful perspectives. At best, the networked press told people important, time-sensitive information; it fostered empathy and thoughtful action; and it helped to create a sophisticated public ready to prosecute this tragedy and prevent future ones. To be sure, there were bright spots. Silence I mean silence as the thoughtful absence of speech. Timing. Social media and the Boston bombings: When citizens and journalists cover the same story. Editor’s note: Hong Qu is a user experience designer who was part of the startup team that built YouTube. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Nieman Foundation, working on an application to help journalists and other users better follow stories though Twitter. In a breaking news situation, journalists get an adrenaline rush. There is a palpable eagerness to get the scoop, to be the first to bring the story to the public.
In today’s world of social media, mobile phones, and the real-time 24/7 news cycle, though, journalists face competition from all sides: eyewitness accounts, official sources, and even friends and family are sharing news before mainstream news institutions have “published” the official news story. To illustrate this predicament, I compiled 26 tweets that “broke” the Boston Marathon bombing news.
[<a href="//storify.com/hqu/boston-marathon-breaking-news">View the story "Who Broke the News of the Boston Marathon Bombing? " Social media is not going away. Here Are the Federal Charges Against Boston Bombing Suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. A memorial honoring the victims of the Boston Marathon explosionsNicolaus Czarnecki/Zuma Dhzokhar Tsarnaev slung his backpack off his shoulder and dropped it on the ground.
A few minutes later, an explosion ripped into the crowd that had gathered to watch the Boston marathon. As the frightened people around him turned and looked in the direction of the first explosion, Dhzokhar Tsarnaev glanced toward the chaos and then "calmly but rapidly" headed the other way. Ten seconds later, the bomb in Dzhokhar's backpack went off. That's all on video captured by a local surveillance cameras, according to the criminal complaint filed Monday against the Dhzokhar Tsarnaev, the only surviving suspect in last week's bombings, which killed three people and maimed more than two hundred others. The complaint goes into detail about how the police found the Tsarnaev brothers after they allegedly carried out the bombing.
You can read the whole complaint here: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's Friends: The Case Against Kadyrbayev, Tazhayakov, and Phillipos. In the weeks since the bombing of the Boston Marathon, there has been an odd feeling of dissonance between the cruelty and symbolic power of the attack on one hand and the seeming lack of technical or ideological sophistication of the Tsarnaev brothers—Tamerlan, the boxer; Dzhokhar, the unmotivated stoner—on the other. Wednesday, that dissonance was only amplified, as three new people were charged in federal court in connection with the crime.
Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, both of Kazakhstan, and both nineteen years old, face federal charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice; they allegedly hid and then disposed of a backpack and laptop belonging to Dzhokhar, whom they met at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, after “concluding from news reports that Tsarnaev was one of the Boston Marathon bombers.” Before they went to Tsarnaev’s room, Kadyrbayev showed Tazhayakov a final message from Dzhokhar: “I’m about to leave if you need something in my room take it.”
Thoughts On The Tsarnaev Complaint. Courtesy of Doug Mataconis, I see that the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts has charged Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev. The complaint and supporting affidavit, again courtesy of Doug, are here. At the time I write this, there's nothing on PACER yet. A few observations about the complaint, and explanations of how this works: 1. Wait, what's a criminal complaint, exactly? 2. 3. Here's what 18 U.S.C. 2332a says, in pertinent part: A person who, without lawful authority, uses, threatens, or attempts or conspires to use, a weapon of mass destruction—. . . (2) against any person or property within the United States, and . . . . In other words, if you use a WMD against a person or property in the United States, and there's an interstate commerce hook to provide a justification for federal jurisdiction, it's a federal crime.
The statute defines "weapon of mass destruction," for purposes of explosives, like this: Dammit. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Last 5 posts by Ken White. The Case Against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: A Guide. Day After Boston Manhunt - The Day After: Midnight On Franklin Street. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Miranda Rights: The public safety exception and terrorism cases. What rights should Dzhokhar Tsarnaev get and why does it matter? | Glenn Greenwald. Reactions to Dzhokhar: Hatred, anger...empathy? - Boston.comment. Tamelan Tsarnaev’s body is no longer at North Attleboro funeral home, company says. Tamerlan Tsarnaev's uncle struggling to find a burial site. Boston bomber heard voices and might be schizophrenic - doctor. Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, Bombing Suspect's Mom, Also On Terror List. Fathers and Sons and Chechnya. Marathon bombing suspects’ father a familiar face on Broadway in Cambridge, where he fixed cars. What You Should Know About Chechnya as the Boston Story Unfolds - Thor Halvorssen.
We know when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sleeps. When Your Twitter Friend Turns Out To Be The Boston Bomber. A Battered Dream for Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Then a Violent Path. Bomb suspect influenced by mysterious radical. ‘Misha’ Speaks: An Interview with the Alleged Boston Bomber’s ‘Svengali’ by Christian Caryl. Body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev has been buried at undisclosed location, Worcester police say.
The fall of the house of Tsarnaev — The Boston Globe. Marathon attack victims - Local. Marathon Bombing Victims. TV | The chaotic Boston manhunt: An animated timeline. Marathon bombings: A timeline of this week’s events - Mass. The Tsarnaevs, Carjacking, and the Boston Marathon bombs. NotifyBoston (City of Boston)
The Boston bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions | Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald on the High Cost of Government Secrecy. Teen Stunned at Portrayal as Boston Bomb Suspect. A Reading Guide to What’s Going on in Boston. 102 hours in pursuit of Marathon bombing suspects. Boston Marathon bombing | Latest news & comment. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev | World news. The 11 Most Mystifying Things the Tsarnaev Brothers Did.