Give ’em an inch…
Whilst it’s hardly equivalent to being forcibly abducted and rendered to a torturing country, this is still a chilling story of censorship and intimidation which illustrates the necessity for intelligence and police services to be constrained by civil liberties laws. From BoingBoing:
Back in May, I wrote about Phil Sandifer, a grad student in English at Gainesville’s University of Florida who was harassed by campus cops for publishing fiction on his LiveJournal. The cops — acting on a tip that appears to have originated from people displeased with Sandifer’s Wikipedia editing style — argued that because Sandifer’s story depicted a murder, he should be fingerprinted and have his DNA taken in order to ensure that he wasn’t responsible for any unsolved murders.
As I investigated this story, the campus cops stonewalled me, but used the fact that I was leaving messages for them to attempt to frighten Sandifer into allowing them to fingerprint and DNA-sample him, saying that a journalist was on the story and he’d better exonerate himself before the story broke. They went to Sandifer’s (righteously angry and uncooperative) faculty advisors and, in front of them, leaned on Sandifer for his biometrics and threatened to retrieve his DNA from his garbage if he wouldn’t concede to a DNA swab.
Mitchell J Silverman, an attorney in Hollywood, Florida, used the state’s sunshine laws to get hold of the police reports on the event.
The report is remarkable for what it doesn’t say: it is an apparent fabrication that contradicts the eyewitness reports of everyone I spoke to involved in this story. We’re left to decide whether Sandifer and his advisors are lying, or whether it’s the police — who ducked reporters, used lies to intimidate Sandifer, and exhibited the poor judgement in investigating someone for unspecified murders because he published fiction about a murder.
It’s an embarrassment to the University of Florida that its police force can attempt to dictate to English students and faculty what fiction can and can’t be published.
Here’s the police report. Mr Silverman has redacted it to eliminate the addresses of the people involved, but it is otherwise as delivered by the police. 750K PDF Link
Read more:Censorship, Free Speech, First amendment,Academic freedom, Police powers, Surveillance, LiveJournal, Blogging
