Farmer arrested for speaking too long at datacenter town hall vows to fight

That's pretty typical of 404 Media's reporting style.

Even so that's very strange way for a trespassing charge to be carried out if that's how it went down.

Typically when someone refuses to leave, police inform the person that they are being formally trespassed, at which point they have the option to leave voluntarily at which point they are only allowed back at the trespassee's discretion. Not sure how that would work for public places where people have to conduct municipal business.

Not quite the same. Here it wasn't just the overreaction from some weak authority figure. The arresting cop had to knowingly violate established laws. The officers who pursued the charge had to have done the same. That's systematic corruption and failure in the local law enforcement who imo all need to be investigated and fired asap. It's less some weak authority overreacting and more like a whole lot of incompetent people who are supposed to uphold the law actively violating it.

No its someone highly influential with a low stake. Someone you basically hide the project from until its in the implementation stage because they will kill it without understanding it.

Land of the Free, First Amendment, Right to Free Speech, Democracy, Community Involvement, etc. etc. etc.

Oklahoma, huh? Wish I could be surprised.

Even then, hard to tell if this will hold up in court. Town halls should be recorded ("should") and there's inevitable up and downtime for speakers. This is why police have a radar tolerance of 5 mph before trying to write a speeding ticket.

"Everyone complaining about things I like, but is located in their communities, is a crank, except when I'm complaining about stuff in my own community."

> Who is building it and who is principally using it?

I was actually just looking into that: Beale Infrastructure, owned by Blue Owl.

we saw a gap: some of the largest global hyperscalers—companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google—needed partners who could move at their speed and scale to solve their growing data needs

https://wealth.blueowl.com/learnengage/ra/capturing-growth-t...

The CEO is ex-Azure/Microsoft:

https://bealeinfra.com/about/

Look, the article is right there, and what it says doesn't match what you're saying. Sure, they arrested him for "trespassing", but their definition of trespassing was going over his allotted time by a matter of seconds.

They did not ask him to leave, and he refused. They counted down the seconds he had the floor, and ordered his arrest the moment he went over the allotted time.

I don't know if you've ever been to a Town Hall before, but this is absolutely ridiculous. When you go over your time, you can either ask for more time or be told that you are done.

You shouldn't be arrested unless you intentionally refuse to conclude your time, or if you create a disruption. He did neither.

They arrested him because they didn't like what he had to say, and they want to send a harsh message to anyone else who dares speak out against Datacenters.

This is an egregious violation of First Amendment rights.

Sure man. Nothing says "hacker ethos" like arresting a citizen for going 3 seconds over their allotted free speech time.

There are so many bootlickers here on HN these days. A sign of the times, I suppose.

But of course, what else can we expect? This is the natural consequence of putting ethics and morality after money. Money always wins. And once you start seeing the world like that, through the lens of "success makes right", you have to bend your view of reality to make it square. And then you wind up here, defending actions like this.