Iranian writer is sentenced to 12 years after tweeting a dot at supreme leader
npr.org
npr.org
>Shanbehzadeh was sentenced to five years for alleged pro-Israel propaganda activity, four years for insulting Islamic sanctities, two years for spreading lies online and an additional year for anti-regime propaganda.
>His lawyer, Amir Raisian, told Shargh Network, a reformist newspaper in Iran, that he would appeal the verdict, especially the accusation of pro-Israel activity. The prosecutor’s office in Ardabil alleged that Shanbehzadeh had been in contact with Israeli intelligence officers and was arrested when trying to leave the country, according to Voice of America.
He was also posting satires about the religion of peace.... :) Source: I'm Iranian.
Seeing this cheap manipulative article suggests they were mistaken.
PS.
Maybe his 12 years sentence is completely unjust, I don't know.
But titles like this... How about "A man is sentenced to death after having cofee for breakfast" for an article about Charles Manson? (I suppose he had cofee sometimes, so formally a true title).
but of course to a certain degree it's subjective.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-i-am-ri...
The author of your link argues that the biased reporters are not necessarily evil. I think this is not the main concern for a reader. His main goal is to build a world view as adequate to reality as possible.
My take on how to approach that as a news consumer: https://avodonosov.blogspot.com/2024/09/scientific-method-fo...
Of course, some reporters are genuinely mistaken despite trying to do best reporting. Others are intentionally manipulative - no doubt that happens often too. But even they can think it is for good. And I agree with your author we should not translate this into hostility in the society by declaring all biased reporters as evil. But we can note their quality.
Speaking of npr.org, I can not decide conclusively from this single example whether they stay in the "decent quality" category. But it suggests they are ready to compromise on quality. It's not only the title that is misguiding. The article body is not keen to make the things clear. I suppose many readers left with a firm belief the man was really sentenced for the dot posted alone.
I think NPR is providing a disservice by reporting the actual "charges" he was found guilty of in 2020, because they don't matter. It's a brutal dictatorship, of course there are laws against criticizing the government ("anti-regime propaganda", and of course anyone can be charged with treason-lite (pro-Israel propaganda) and ... it's a theocracy, of course there are blasphemy laws, yeey!
We don't have high-certainty information about the proximate causes that landed this guy in prison, but it doesn't matter (it matters for scholars if they are doing some kind of deep dive on crackdowns, and of course it matters for actual people on the ground, who are trying to contest the charges, but even then the statistics is not kind to their efforts).
Similarly putting the photo of the ayatollah there is a disservice to Hossein.
And ... when it comes to what to do with this as a news consumer, the sad fact is that this is not news. There's zero new bit of actionable information in this. (NPR published this because "Iran International" published this on 31 Aug, the "trial" was apparently on 7th of August. He tweeted in June, and was released from prison sometime around April in 2023. Wikipedia says 2024, but it's likely wrong.)
The photo is irrelevant and could easily be left out, but why is it a disservice to Hossein Shanbehzadeh?
> I agree that NPR is regurgitating the narrative by "Iran International English", but to me the body of the article is crystal clear, this guy was an activist, and this particular "ratio-ing" was a likely trigger that led to him being included in this batch of people "to be made example of".
I have never heard of "Iran International". And in general I know very little about Iran. Some caricature mentions (https://youtu.be/g2KsZHRrFpU?t=88, https://youtu.be/9EDkTAaUMDU?t=1055), a brief approach to the wikipedia article sometime long ago, islamic revolution, head scarfs... The link got me curious about the level of opposing actions suficient to be prosecuted in Iran. I tried to search for Hossein Shanbehzadeh's original social media posts made after his release from the previous sentence - that's the biggest missing part for me. Failed to find them - the twitter account was deactivated, other social media didn't show up in the search results for "Hossein Shanbehzadeh". But there are several pages in google search results of other news sites posting the same story. So may be the media not repeating "Iran International" directly, but simply racing to repeat each other and publish this sensational message, withouth giving too much dilligence and thinking?
BTW, Uzbek branch of Radio Libery reports that:
"According to the lawyer, the prosecution did not prove to the guilt of Shanbehzade under the most difficult article. As evidence of guilt under other articles, the court cited his posts in support of political prisoners and the abolition of the mandatory wearing of the hijab, the use of the hashtag #NoToExecutions, criticism of the Iranian elections and the expression of joy about the death of former President Ebrahim Raisi.
[..]
As Iran International notes, critics of the Iranian regime often use the point and other single symbols to express disagreement with the authorities."
https://rus.ozodlik.org/a/33103899.html (auto translated from russion to english).
> We don't have high-certainty information about the proximate causes that landed this guy in prison, but it doesn't matter (it matters for scholars if they are doing some kind of deep dive on crackdowns, and of course it matters for actual people on the ground, who are trying to contest the charges, but even then the statistics is not kind to their efforts).
Why the real reasons do not matter for usual readers? They very much matter, I think.
> I think NPR is providing a disservice by reporting the actual "charges" he was found guilty of in 2020, because they don't matter.
You mean 2024. The info about the formal official charges makes the picture more complete.
Wait... Do you value the quality of the article not by its informativeness for the reader, but by level of "service" it makes to Hossein Shanbehzadeh?
Wow! I don't know if that's really your position, but that's a mind blowing possibility!
> It's a brutal dictatorship, of course there are laws against criticizing the government ("anti-regime propaganda", and of course anyone can be charged with treason-lite (pro-Israel propaganda) and ... it's a theocracy, of course there are blasphemy laws, yeey!
Do you mean the Iranian regime is a-priori evil, so everyone prosecuted by it is a-priori good and suffers undeservedly. Therefore decent media just need to mobilize public support for them, even if falsifying / concealing the reality from the readers? (Even if the premises was true, such reasoning conclusion is wrong).
> And ... when it comes to what to do with this as a news consumer, the sad fact is that this is not news. There's zero new bit of actionable information in this. (NPR published this because "Iran International" published this on 31 Aug, the "trial" was apparently on 7th of August. He tweeted in June, and was released from prison sometime around April in 2023. Wikipedia says 2024, but it's likely wrong.)
The information may be not immediately actionable, but as a news consumer I want to build adequate worldview, which may form the ground for decisions and actions in the future.
> Why the real reasons do not matter for usual readers? They very much matter, I think.
Of course the real reason matters, but the reason is not the "charges". (And as I said, the whole process might be of interest to some people, so correctly reporting can be a valuable service.)
> Do you mean the Iranian regime is a-priori evil
Dictatorships can do good things too, so no. For example providing healthcare, education, etc. Even shitty public services are better than nothing in many cases. And that includes policing too. (Despite all the rage about abolition of police we know that power vacuums likely lead to bad things.)
That said when it comes to crackdowns on protest activity my prior for "dictatorship doing bad thing" is pretty fucking high.
> Do you value the quality of the article not by its informativeness for the reader, but by level of "service" it makes to Hossein Shanbehzadeh?
I value both. As a reader I don't want to read a hack job, and as readers' attention and time are very scarce I don't like the presence and proliferation of these low-quality pieces. (I am aware that it was likely even worse before. When people had fewer opportunities to check what the fuck the newspapers printed.) And if a piece is about someone then that someone deserves that the text does not selectively misrepresent facts, and handles topics with the care they deserve. I don't like that this guy's plight has become basically a tick in a checkbox for "make content", and particularly that it became clickbait.
And of course he could think otherwise. Perhaps he thinks any press is good press. Maybe it helps his situation. But that's the question that I want to get information on, not about which branch of the kangaroo court he was dragged to.
> ... as a news consumer I want to build adequate worldview, ...
Me too, but as mentioned, time and attention are the bottleneck. And maybe my expectations for news is unrealistically high.
These days Reuters is the closest thing to relatively unbiased reporting in the West. imo.
If someone publicly called for specific violence (ex: "let's all meet at Joe's house to burn it down—I'll bring the lighter") that feels to me like the sort of thing that would be useful to do something about instead of waiting for the actual crime to be committed.
But publicly stating that you support a violent act that somebody else did? Criticizing widely accepted beliefs? Expressing that you don't like a particular sort of person? I don't see how we could possibly criminalize anything like that without neutering the ability for a society to come up with new ideas.
Tim Urban's "What's Our Problem" has a great framing of this question: the sort of discourse needed for a high-rung "idea lab" requires that people are about to speak publicly in ways that appear to be "spreading lies online" (one of the crimes Shanbehzadeh, the Iranian writer, was apparently charged with). Without that freedom we all descend into tribal barbarism that leaves us stuck in the current set of ideas we happen to have right now.
In our history, the credible threat of social violence has been absolutely necessary for justice & progress on numerous occasions. It's why we have everything from civil rights for racial minorities to voting rights for women to labor rights for workers to generous benefits for veterans.
The establishment response to somebody like a Martin Luther King is mockery and condemnation, and only when fear of a Malcolm X led uprising becomes salient does the political capital to sue for peace, form.
So I disagree that prohibition of violent public speech is an aspirational privilege otherwise necessary for justice and progress. A terrorist Ghandi wouldn't have been as effective against the British Raj (who could and did kill indiscriminately).
If you were talking about private speech (not threats), I would have some more understanding.
Apropos of the date, the Pullman Strikes are the reason we have Labor Day as a national holiday. 70 people died during that strike and around 60 more were seriously wounded. Violence was common during strikes in the 1800s, but Pullman was especially chaotic -- but par for the course as global labor struggles went.
I can think of 2.
The end of the reconstruction period (slash-start-of-Jim-Crow) was brought about by violence (and threats of violence). The newly-formed KKK and fellow travellers successfully used lynchings to deter the formerly enslaved from participating in the political process (as candidates and voters), which was the status quo.
The Stonewall riots were were a another one - I'm certain there are more examples in between those 2.
To be fair civil rights and relative racial equality was imposed by an (effectively) foreign army of occupation.
That army leaving is what led to Jim Crow, there was hardly any meaningful bottom-top societal change since the local Republican governments could have never survived without significant external support anyway.
KKK/etc. were effectively an unofficial enforcement branch / citizen militia of the local elites and state governments.
IMHO the situation was a bit like the war in Afghanistan (just with a slightly narrower cultural gap). Women rights could only survive as long as the US/NATO force were there to impose them and they reverted to the status quo as soon as the foreign militaries left.
I mean there was the whole civil war thing…
If a movement has millions of people, possibility of violence is implied if you piss then off enough.
Also, that threat of violence didn't lead to the success of the Confederacy, but to its destruction.
Even in very similar Anglosphere cultures like Britain, a liberal constitutional monarchy, all of that had been achieved, even earlier in many cases, without the overt glorification of violence as a normal part of the political process.
In fact liberal monarchies, even before they were democratic had done a pretty good job of delivering steady progress without being dogmatic on speech or even justifying violent revolution. Just assuming for a second we agree on a broad notion of progress if you draw the US on a graph next to her a little bit less rebellious peers I don't think it's that clear that the violence was necessary.
Just one snippet:
The Peterloo Massacre took place at St Peter's Field, Manchester, Lancashire, England, on Monday 16 August 1819. Eighteen people died and 400–700 were injured when cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation.
The Kent State shootings were the killing of four and wounding of nine unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard
Modern English monarchy history easily traces back to 1066 and the political history to the issue of the Magna Carta in 1215.
It's selective to limit political violence to last Civil War (of many wars | rebellions of the last 800 years) and blinkered to claim that the modern UK doesn't put the boot in (eg: Thatcher during the miners strikes .. instigated by the Thatcher government in a deliberate ploy to break trade unions across all industries).
In contrast, the Chinese Civil War (ending in 1949) was bloodier than any conflict in the 20th Century except the 2 world wars, and Rwanda had a little internal conflict in 1994 that resulted in the death of 491,000–800,000 citizens (of the Tutsi ethnic group). Also since the 1980s, 350,000–1,000,000+ have been killed and 2,000,000–3,800,000 displaced by internal conflicts in Somalia. Also, Libya and Syria more recently.
>Modern English monarchy history easily traces back to 1066 . . . It's selective to limit political violence to last Civil War.
It is the recent centuries of the history of a country that is the most informative for predicting what will happen in the future.
Only if we exclude Ireland and the Scottish Highlands which were both part of the UK.
Being on an island and mostly free from foreign threats (compared to countries continental Europe) helped though. Scandinavia for instance has also been similarly peaceful (if not more so) in the same period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_May
> The BPU had made its reputation amid the spontaneous rioting that had accompanied the fall of the First Reform Bill in 1831, assembling 150,000 protesters at Newhall Hill in the largest political assembly the country had ever seen.[15] Its threat to reorganise itself along semi-military lines in November 1831 had led to suggestions that it was trying to usurp the civil authority, and made a deliberate, if implicit, threat of the possibility of armed revolt in the event of the formation of an anti-reform government.
Ultimately led to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832 which dramatically expanded the voting franchise.
The French Revolution, and the almost total destruction of an aristocratic/noble/royal system, was the subtext of every bottom-up political movement in Europe in this era.
But even there it was in large part only the case because the Hanoverian regime was highly effective at suppressing any type of dissent in pretty brutal ways.
> law-abiding part of the world.
The existence of the ‘Bloody Code’ would imply otherwise.
They functioned as a method of class suppression.
A singular action with no bloodshed that followed a period in which bodies were stacked high, including over a hundred thousand non combat civilians.
A singular action with no bloodshed that sparked a long series of bloody revolts that began in March 1689, with major outbreaks in 1715 and 1719, and culminated in the Jacobite rising of 1745.
Yes - he did mention the day James was deposed, you ignored the rest of century that surrounded that day.
As far as I can tell, people in the UK have the right to vote because of, variously:
The Parliament setting the King straight on who would win in a fight
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Charles_I
The Parliament gradually setting the King straight on whose support he needs to enact foreign policy, and the King's failures strengthening opposition in Parliament over the course of
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_First_Coalition
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_III
An apocalyptic and thereafter omnipresent fear of the aristocracy losing their heads after the French Revolution, leading to cycles of tyrannical repression of the working class alternating with massive working class actions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Acts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
Violence from radical working & middle class suffragists following this period
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_May
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832
The threat of violence from radical working class suffragists, tinged with the prospect of religious and Irish revolutionary violence
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_League#Hyde_Park_demons...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_League#English_Civil_Wa...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1867
Numerous peaceful and less peaceful actions over many years by women's suffragists, including a protracted terrorist bombing campaign
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_Unit...
You could go on, but I'm no expert on UK history. Social change in UK democracy seems to mostly demand angry disenfranchised masses, a very few sympathetic ears in the House of Lords, and a larger body of Parliament & middle class people who want to strike some kind of nonviolent compromise and maintain order even if giving up some power offends.
The US is very similar in that this is the stuff we don't like to talk about. The fact that our military fought a brief, bloody war or two against mining unions before any labor rights were recognized was a single decontextualized paragraph in my history textbook at age 15, and was never mentioned again.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
This replaced the previous standard, Clear and Present Danger.
The goal isn't always this instrumental one. There is also freedom of conscience, which (like the US freedom of religion) isn't about generating new ideas.
But wrt to the goal of generating new ideas you also need to consider all ways of making it too expensive to access information. There's the 1984 approach of violently preventing the spread of information. Then there's the more Brave New World aligned approach of flooding all communication platforms with distracting nonsense and lies.
The second strategy scales a lot better. A lot of people are stuck in a mindset where you can shut down a few printing presses and kill an idea. That's the old war. The new war is much harder and we mostly haven't even begun to be honest with ourselves about it, let alone found any good answers for what to do about it.
I think just as there is freedom of speech- there is freedom to hear. If I want to listen to someone's words I should not be prevented from hearing them. Why do we need platforms? We have the internet already but then we are still at the whims of a search engine. We want our cake and to eat it too.
> Why do we need platforms?
I'm currently of the opinion that hierarchies are partially an informational thing. Nodes that summarize or aggregate information from other nodes are higher in some abstract hierarchy (e.g. perhaps they have higher in-degree). Those abstractions tend to become more concrete and those nodes become points of centralization or what you might call platforms.
The platforms don't have to look like they do now (in fact I hope they don't), but I am currently skeptical of any perfectly flat communication system just on informational grounds.
I'd also be interested to have some examples of the current set of ideas that you believe we are stuck with. It's an interesting phrase, and it begs to be enumerated.
What I mean by the current set of ideas we’re stuck with is the total set of every mainstream idea we have about everything. There have been a few recent examples of ideas that used to be considered misinformation worthy of censorship that have since gotten unstuck and are now part of the new accepted set (ex: the idea that COVID might be a lab leak, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Ivermectin). Without free speech that lets extremists explore “unacceptable” fringe ideas our society gets to the actual truth much slower.
But isn't that exactly the point of policies like this? They're intended to dissuade new ideas, such as ideas about who should be in charge of society.
Like the folks who think the Second Amendment means you can own nukes, or the Libertarian Party folks who don't like drivers' licenses, they're pretty fringe.
To me, these kinds of injuries are worse than many kinds of physical violence. People who have been extracted from, and recover from, situations like this (as much as anyone can) often say they would have preferred to be beaten. And they don't mean this lightly.
This is all "just" speech; the perpetuators and victims often agree that they "never laid a finger on them". But it hardly about beginning or preventing new ideas. In some countries, this kind of speech and pattern of abuse is criminal. But it's not universally so. Should it be? The way these countries frame it is that rights - like freedom of speech - are not absolutely, but must be balanced with the harm they may cause, and to assess things almost case by case with balancing tests. This seems to me a very workable system of law with good outcomes.
For me verbal abuse is in the same sort of category as rigging up a bomb to detonate when I've tweeted a keyword. The crime isn't really about the ideas being expressed (which I believe should be protected), the crimes just happen to involve speech.
Where abusive speech gets tricky for me is when people feel that ideas being publicly expressed are harming them (ex: a twitter discussion perpetuating hateful stereotyoes of people like me). In my current position that sort of speech is some of the most important to protect because I don't like it.
Technically the article never says the dot is related to the arrest, but it's certainly implied.
Given the last sentence of the article is "The prosecutor’s office in Ardabil alleged that Shanbehzadeh had been in contact with Israeli intelligence officers and was arrested when trying to leave the country, according to Voice of America." it's not even implied.
Even carefully reading it, the dot takes up significantly more of the article than what Iran claim the charges were.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/02/iranian-woman-...
He was also posting satires about the religion of peace.... :) Source: I'm Iranian.
Edit: I guess there's this [1] which free-speach maximalists would probably disagree with. Personally I think there's a line between free speech and calls to violence at which point its reasonable to prosecute people. She tweeted calling for people to set fire to buildings where migrants were being housed.
In these riots we have charged a 12 year old orphan, sentenced 13 year old girl, jailed a guy for being “a curious observer”, and some woman for throwing water.
Previously, we have sentenced a teenager for reposting a rap song, some guy for filming his pug doing nazi salute, and charged two guys for possession of a book ‘Anarchist cookbook’
Also we have charged a woman for silent prayer.
So now I understand why a book about ‘thoughtcrime’ was written in Britain, it’s a local idea that was in the air for some time
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/09/judge-refuses-ba...
This is standard pre-trial detention because pretty serious crimes were committed. Obviously if its found at their trial that they didn't commit any crime then they won't be going to prison.
He claims he was a curious observer, but frankly he can claim whatever he likes. Like everyone in pre-trial detention he is innocent until proven guilty so his claim doesn't really change anything.
Firstly she wasn't sentenced for insulting him, she was sentenced for threats of violence against him, specifically she wrote something like "you won't be able to go anywhere without having your face kicked in" and leaked his personal information.
Secondly she was in jail for 2 days, this was Freizeitarrest which is legally distinct from an actual prison sentence, with the aim of showing someone how unpleasant prison can be. You're not in a normal cell, don't have contact with regular prisoners, it doesn't leave a police record, doesn't have the same probation or anything.
Finally he wasn't sentenced to jail because he was a minor. He did get sentenced to 60 hours of labor with the proceeds going to her. I don't know whether 60 hours of unpaid (presumably) unpleasant labor is harsher than the very short "jail" sentence she got, personally I would say so but it probably depends on the person.
Personally I would agree that his sentence wasn't harsh enough, but German law doesn't really like giving minors harsh sentences. I think her punishment for the threats of violence were completely reasonable.
Imagine people imprisoning a 90 year old woman for refusing to adopt their imposed narrative of a historical period in which she actively lived and participated.
Yes... ? She participated... on the side of the Nazis who murdered Jews? She even threatened Jews with "a new pogrom"? I'd imprison her all right!
I don't question the particular facts of this situation, but Voice of America is literally a propaganda outlet. It is not meant to be objective journalism, and was used during the Cold War to counter Soviet propaganda. It should not be cited as a reliable source.
I don't care if you question the facts or not. I want you to question the motives.
it might be fun to play the legal game "but what law did I break" in a country with rights and rule of law, but in a country without it...? I'm pretty sure Shanbehzadeh knew what he was risking.
I live in Belarus, haven't heard of anyone locked for news cached on their phone. Could you provide sources of that info? I read all kinds of news, what if I am in danger...
Proposed solution was - disable all media caching in Telegram.
Question. If you read Belarusian news, have you noticed that tut.by, being a quite decent, balanced news site in, say, 2013, 2014, in last years of its existence, maybe 2018, 2019, 2020 was quickly degrading, somewhere towards the Radio of the Thousand Hills? Deliberately falsifying the picture of reality for its readers?
(Personally, by the beginning of 2020, long before the election, I had a text in mind, called "Осторожно, tut.by". Just didn't have time to write it up and publish.)
There are no sources to be trusted. And let me warn you against trusting Zerkalo.
But armed with the scientific method, one can use any propaganda as an informative source. And the more it contradicts one's views the more informative it is. On the other hand, reading confirmations of what one saw already confirmed many times is basically a waste of time.
My attempt for a more elaborate version of this: http://avodonosov.blogspot.com/2024/09/scientific-method-for...
As for the deliberate manipulations and back to the HN topic. Have you noticed that the Iranian man was sentenced "after" tweeting a dot? Not "because", not "for" , but simply "after"? If you read the article, there is no evidence of causal link between the dot posted and the arrest. The arrest just happened chronologically after. The actual charges are different and the man has a long history of being at odds with the ruling regime.
I think that's an intentionally misleading title. And you seem fallen for it, replying "what for people in Belarus are being locked up".
I understand why the regime is posting all these "confession videos" - it is the same propaganda, but aiming to coral people into being afraid to read news. And it seems to work. (And in a way opposition media is helping regime with this task.)
And no, I am not suggesting to not read. Someone on hn is plenty equipped to get through these things technologically, without becoming another piece of regime propaganda and/or getting their life ruined. It is absurdity of what people in civilized country in 21st century are subjected to is what drives me nuts.
I hope it's clear I am not supporting the arrest. I just don't like fakes.
> I do personally know people locked up for 2+ years for clicking the like button (and not after clicking on the button) on the article in telegram.
What are the official charges? I did a quick search. Actions like this fall under article 19.11 of the Administrative Code. (https://etalonline.by/document/?regnum=hk2100091). Distribution, production, or possession with the goal of distribution, of information products containing calls to extremist activity.
Likes and subscriptions to such sources may be considered their endorsement and also fall under this article. https://www.court.gov.by/ru/mogilevskij/oblastnoj/sud/press_... https://lida.gov.by/printv/ru/2023-edi-ru/view/o-merax-proti...
(I know you probably can't access the URLs from abroad, maybe will post screenshots later).
But the penalties under this article do not include prison. It can result in fine, confiscation of the device used, administrative arrest (max 15 days), community service.
Aren't you confusing people who got 2+ years in prison for a like with people who say they got 2+ years in prison for a like?
Overall, that's not a topic for the HN forum, but let me say that the political views you (and many others) seem to have, are mistaken, in my opinion. The mistake is not in what you see. The suppression of the protest exists, although maybe not in such extreme form as you think.
The mistake is in the gigantic "elephants in the room" that you don't see and don't account for.
I neither study this subject, nor watch it closely. And I can imagine anything. But until I see real facts of such arrests, I will stay in doubt. And will continue reading whatever I want.
Few months back a new hire quit on his second day when he saw that, because he was afraid he might get into trouble since he has to regularly travel to Russia (he was from, eh, somewhere in Eastern Europe or the Balkans or some such – I forgot).
We had some discussions about whether that was completely paranoid and stupid, or whether it was somewhat reasonable/understandable.
I was firmly in the last camp. Yes, maybe the chance of actually suffering consequences is small and in that sense it's paranoid, but people buy lottery tickets with a lower chance of winning. The arbitrariness of it is the point.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2024/08/15/us-russ...
While small, the chance of getting caught up in these shenanigans is far higher than that of buying a winning lottery ticket. And the potential penalties much worse than could be alleviated by most any prize won in the lottery. (If they were from one of Russia's allies, such as Serbia or Hungary, they probably wouldn't have much to worry about. But if they're from a NATO country, then definitely so).
We see they had a project in 2022 that did provide some drones, but this seems to have been in the context of supporting search and rescue operations and the like, not military operations.
Razom maintains that it does not provide military supplies of any kind. Let alone "weapons and ammunition" per the FSB charges.
Overall the charges seem to have as much credibility as the initial charge against her of "swearing in a public place".
But in any case, my question stands. Let's say a US citizen donated to a fund that supplied drones to Russia. Said drones do not carry a military payload, but can be used for recon and artillery targeting. What would you think about this person?
Whether it continued to do so by the time of her donation (in late 2023) -- being as Razom does seem to have shifted its emphasis in recent years (completely independent of any recent "sanitizing" of their website as you allege, but based on my own recollection of their messaging 2022-2023) -- is a different matter.
That's all I have time for at the moment. I may comment further again in 1-2 days.
Meanwhile let's remember that the arrest (and draconian sentencing) were in themselves a very deliberate form of propaganda. It's not like the various Russian agencies could begin to care about a $51 donation. They did what they did for certain reasons, one of which was to send some very specific messages -- on one hand to the U.S. government; but also to their own people, both inside the Motherland and abroad.
That latter message being: "We're watching you, wherever you are, and however small and unimportant you think you are - so don't you even begin to think of crossing us."
This case was probably particularly appealing to them in part precisely because the charges could be presented as borderline plausible (rather than being simply trumped up from scratch). Even if they would ultimately prove to be quite flimsy if evaluated by the standards of countries with actual working justice systems, as seems to be the case here.
It's just another part of their playbook.
How is that relevant? You're trying to equate someone's personal opinion to the Russian government putting someone in prison for 12-year due to $51?
And that's far from the most egregious example. There are plenty of people in Russian prisons for much less than that (e.g. reciting poetry or ambiguous social media posts).
Anyway regardless of anyone's personal opinion that's not how sanction enforcement or the US judicial system on the whole works. The U.S. Treasury Department has allowed transactions related to humanitarian causes (and a bunch of other cases) so what are you even talking about?
Either way, I certainly don't think he was making stuff up. He could have left at any time without any reason. We weren't holding him captive.
... how authoritarianism shapes public discourse
"It's only illegal if you get caught."
See I was onboard with this reasoning until last week - we arrested the boss of Telegram and charged him with allowing illicit activity, which obviously happens on WhatsApp and other apps too. Isis was literally recruiting members on western social networks!
And we spent months discussing banning of TikTok, my major politicians in mainstream parties. so we aren’t far
What are the fines for using a banned service in the US?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/lula-says-musk-must-respe...
In general, users never face fines in the US even for visiting "banned" pages.
You might be oversimplifying. Yes, the US does have particularly free speech, and especially for listening to it. But using kiddie porn sites, president threatening sites, ISIS recruiting sites, US govt leaked secrets sharing sites, perhaps ghost gun or bomb making sites, stalking ex girlfriends... I think a good bit of that has legal consequences for people under many circumstances. Evidence used to convict you is not much different than... evidence.
Some of the things you list are actual criminal acts, not Web sites. Yes, if you stalk your ex, that's criminal, but simply visiting some Web site is not in itself illegal.
If there is some US law that might purport to forbid just visiting a Web site, I've never heard of any attempt to enforce it.
What the hell is a "president threatening site"? Threats to public officials as a service?
The fact that something can, in some circumstances, be evidence doesn't mean it's a crime, and the distinction is absolutely critical in the context we're dealing with here.
It's pretty clear that this person thought there were such penalties, but in fact the US has absolutely nothing analogous. No order remotely like that would be issued in the US, because it's so obviously unconstitutional. If some third-tier hick judge did issue such an order, it would be overturned on appeal. If it were issued by the Supreme Court (and, no, not even the current Supreme Court would do that), all hell would break loose throughout the political system. It'd be a constitutional crisis. There are no such fines in the US. The US does lots of things wrong, but this is one of the areas the US tends to get right.
You're dredging up unrelated scenarios involving not-even-hypothetically-existent crimes that nobody was talking about. This is not about trying to use Web site visits to set somebody up for some crime they didn't commit, or even for some crime they did commit. Your weird scenario about, I don't know, being wrongfully charged with something else because your Web history somehow made somebody think you'd done it, is completely out of left field. The issue is entirely whether there's a penalty for visiting a Web site, and what you're talking about is totally irrelevant. And the hypothetical you seem to be trying to spin sounds less like being convicted of murder when there's no body, and more like being convicted of murder when the victim is known to be alive.
How about the website for Iran's supreme leader[1], with headlines like "ZIONIST REGIME FACES SEVERE CONSEQUENCES FOR ITS ACTIONS"? It's not blocked in the US.
https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/nys/pressreleases/Decem...
"From approximately 2005 through 2006, IQBAL, through a Brooklyn and Staten Island-based satellite transmission company he helped operate, HDTV Limited, provided satellite transmission services to al-Manar, in exchange for thousands of dollars in payments from al-Manar. IQBAL provided these services knowing that al-Manar is Hizballah's television station."[2]
It's hard to work out exactly what this means.
Another article[4] does some sleuthing and claims that Iqbal had an FCC licensed earth station that was uplinking in the Ku-band to "ALSAT". That implies that he was actually repeating the al-Manar broadcasts onto a satellite that had a footprint over the US.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism links[5] to some documents for the case, including the original indictment[6]. Some of the "overt acts" listed in this indictment included signing a contract in Lebanon in which his company agreed to provide broadcasting services for al-Manar in exchange for a fee. Additionally, he was charged with providing access to these broadcasts to satellite customers.
I wonder if he would have gotten in trouble if he had only done the latter - helped consumers to tap into al-Manar without actually being part of the technical broadcast chain.
Very interesting case, thanks for the rabbit hole!
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/25/nyregion/25tv.html
2: https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/newyork/press-releases/200...
3: https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/nys/pressreleases/Decem...
4: https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/fbi-raids-backyard-interna...
5: https://www.investigativeproject.org/case/190/us-v-iqbal-et-...
6: https://www.investigativeproject.org/case_docs/us-v-iqbal-et...
Imho you should all stop that. It's too simple. It doesn't really increase credibility.
Why not start dealing with actual discussions there, and maybe have a little less "everything was already said; just not yet by everyone" discussions in other places?!
And I mean at the end of the day they murder a lot less children than other regimes in the area, so it's quantifiably less evil than some middle eastern countries.