FBI Wiretapped Hemingway 254
Hugh Pickens writes "On the fiftieth anniversary of the death by suicide of author Ernest Hemingway, his friend and biographer A. E. Hotchner writes in the NY Times that the man who 'had stood his ground against charging water buffaloes, who had flown missions over Germany, who had refused to accept the prevailing style of writing but, enduring rejection and poverty, had insisted on writing in his own unique way, this man, my deepest friend, was afraid — afraid that the FBI was after him, that his body was disintegrating, that his friends had turned on him, that living was no longer an option.' In the midst of depression and under treatment at St. Mary's Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, Hemingway was convinced that his room was bugged, his phone was tapped, and suspected that one of the interns was a fed. Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the FBI released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Hemingway under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest's activities in Cuba. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary's Hospital, making it likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all. 'In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest's fear of the FBI, which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the FBI file,' writes Hotchner, author of Papa Hemingway and Hemingway and His World. 'I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.'"
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:0, Informative)
It's not lulzsec's fault, even if they are incompetent, misinformed and illiterate fools.
Just because you're paranoid (Score:1, Informative)
Doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:4, Informative)
Not to worry. The hope and change we voted for will be here any moment to take us to Candy Mountain.
Re:punctuation! (Score:1, Informative)
In addition to all the properly placed commas, there are several periods. As such, it is not "one freaking long sentence".
Ernest was a willing red spy since 1941 (Score:2, Informative)
Might make you depressed if you thought your were going to be exposed.
Might even convince you it was time to kill yourself.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/09/hemingway-failed-kgb-spy
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Informative)
To compare LulzSec with rapists or thugs is rediculous; comparing the CEOs to victims is so outrageous it's almost funny. There are plenty of serious "cyber" criminals who are hacking into people's systems for real money and causing real damage to people like you and me; the consumers who have their data being stored by these corporates. What makes LulzSec different is that, instead of just putting some charges on your credit card and never telling anyone where they got the data they published what they did. That's just bringing to the surface an issue which was already happening before LulzSec got involved.
LulzSec caused public nuisiance and annoyance but that makes them more stupid teenage vandals than thugs. The main bad thing they have done is embarassing the powerful and pointing out publicly what data was already available to the real black hats. It's not just that the corporates should have had better security, it's that:
For now I think there's quite a bit more value in pursuing the CEOs than the
countertrolling & the trolltalk.com crew (Score:1, Informative)
Cheat the moderation system - here's where countertrolling explains what he's doing while he trolls others (to his fellow trolltalk.com friends) to downmod them via his registered account, logout, & ac stalk, harass, and troll them:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2245866&cid=36491652 [slashdot.org]
Here's where countertrolling's "troll mechanics" for downmodding others is explained in detail by someone that got sick of it happening:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2271908&cid=36579618 [slashdot.org]
As far as bogus up moderations, the trolltalk.com bunch (tomhudson, countertrolling, & others) collectively "team up" to upmod one another, in teams, as favors to one another.
(Talk about low, and bogus!)
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In fact, here's what he says about it, why he does it, and to all of us here:
"What the skiddies here don't understand is that I don't give a shit about dumbass 'karma' on the internet.. I'm here for the jollies with nothing to lose or fight for.. watching them destroy their world.. They can go absolutely nuts as far as I'm concerned.. It's nothing but pure entertainment (and data points) for me and mine... Tragicomedy is probably the best word I can think of to describe it" - by countertrolling (1585477) on Thursday June 30, @10:26AM (#36622502) Journal
QUOTED VERBATIM FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2281808&cid=36622502 [slashdot.org]
Sounds like a sick individual to me.
He's my favorite author... (Score:5, Informative)
But Hemingway also was, by most accounts, not a particularly happy individual. I am not meaning to absolve the FBI from blame for its misbehavior; but his dad commited suicide, his mom mailed him the gun his father used for that, he couldn't stay in a relationship, and he had a drinking problem - he already had 2.9 strikes against him. His semi-autobiographical Nick Adams stories all seemed to show a poor sense of self worth too.
It seems odd that the FBI would worry about his activities in Cuba, though, given how his writing sure seemed (to me) to be pretty pro-Batista.
Re:hey, asshole (Score:5, Informative)
the damage done to the usa by communist infiltrators was less than that by the hystertical overreacting nitwits
This statement is not true. Joseph McCarthy was actually correct. The Venona decrypts, declassified in 1999-2002, identified a lot of the Communist Party CPUSA members and revealed them to be Soviet agents. And the Mitrokhin Archive, an internal KGB record of their own history, smuggled out of Russia in 1992 by their former senior archivist Vasily Mitrokhin, shows quite clearly the depths of penetration of the Soviet agents, as well as their strategies of spreading disinformation. These documents are readily available, go check them out at your local bookstore or library.
Now McCarthy was indeed a zealot, and used improper means of "persuasion" instead of following legal channels, but his claims were fairly accurate. Much of Hollywood was infiltrated, as well as the U.S. State Department, and even Congress. But McCarthy was unable to publicly back his claims with the data because the Venona project itself and all its data was classified top secret, and was not to be revealed in case they gave away the secret that we were reading Soviet "one-time pads". (Hint: they used their pads two times, which broke their security.) This was an operational mistake that happened from 1946-1948, and so they could have safely used the data then as the Soviets had corrected the mistake before he went public, but the FBI had no way of knowing that. Among other interesting tidbits, the Venona decrypts proved conclusively that the Rosenbergs were indeed the traitors that gave the secret of the bomb to the Soviets. The campaign to cloud their guilt with doubt was just one of the many Soviet disinformation campaigns. (These campaigns included such crap as "AIDS was created by the U.S. Army as a bioweapon", which even the Russians now regret having spread.)
the damage done to the usa by terorrism today is less than that by the hystertical overreacting nitwits
I agree with you and believe this statement is true. Many of our rights have been stripped by the misnamed USA PATRIOT act, and our government has gone apeshit crazy, all even better than the results UBL hoped for when he attacked. I'd much rather have the occasional terrorist attempt than the current form of the DHS. At least an idiot on a plane today is going to be jumped by a hundred very pissed off travelers. Nobody's ever going to fly another plane into a building on our soil again, not while there are solid cockpit doors and a few real Americans on board.
However, there is quite a bit of difference between the two. McCarthy acted alone, from secret knowledge. The DHS is acting as the face of the U.S. government. The politicians are bringing war to all kinds of new places in the name of terrorism. They've completely soiled this country and her reputation, and they should be stopped.