links for 2010-01-26

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »

4 replies on “links for 2010-01-26”

  1. Might this be the same James O’Keefe that was recently honored with a Congressional Resolution by Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX) and 31 Republican United States Representatives for his work as a “diligent investigative journalist”?

  2. Yes Bubby, this is the same guy. I wonder if there will be a nice, long investigation on who is actually backing this guy.

  3. Whatever the group was up to, they crossed the line beyond Michael Moore-style “gotcha” filmmaking and for the record, I reject and denounce their behavior in this incident.

    That said, the interests of accuracy compel me to point out that neither the article you’ve linked to, or more importantly, the underlying affidavit allege any actual attempt to “bug” or “wiretap” the phone system (as you state in your post). That’s merely spin, unsubstantiated by any evidence, that leftists are using so they can invoke Watergate when describing the incident.

  4. That said, the interests of accuracy compel me to point out that neither the article you’ve linked to, or more importantly, the underlying affidavit allege any actual attempt to “bug” or “wiretap” the phone system (as you state in your post).

    Actually, that’s precisely what the article said. As you can read in their follow-up:

    While initial media reports (including on TPM) described the episode at Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office as an attempted bugging, that term does not appear in the affidavit and the lawyer for one of the charged men tells TPMmuckraker, “the complaint is not about a wiretap.”

    It’s still a mystery what exactly filmmaker James O’Keefe and his companions intended to do when they allegedly arrived at Landrieu’s office. But the accurate way to describe what allegedly happened would be attempted phone tampering.

    At the time that I wrote this, the story reported all over was that he had been arrested for attempted wiretapping.

    Whatever the charges are, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that wiretapping is exactly what they were doing. When members of a political party in the habit of making secret recordings of their opponents dress up as telephone repairmen, walk into a U.S. Senator’s office, and get caught tampering with the phone system, it would be jumping to conclusions not to assume that their purpose was to monitor the senator’s telephone conversations.

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