How does a 2013 model Mercedes Benz with a five star ANCAP safety rating (the highest rating you can get) scoring 35.51 points scored out of 37 (an Australian car safety rating for reference) with more airbags than wheels (8 airbags for those of you playing at home including a curtain airbag that drops in-front of the passenger and driver protecting the head and upper-body from impacting anything) crash into a tree without there even being another vehicle involved?
The car has stability control, traction control, ABS, EBD, brake assist and three-point pre-tensioning seatbelts. If you've ever driven a modern BMW, Mercedes or any other premium European vehicle than you'd know it's impossible to crash these things unless you honestly wanted to crash them. I am pretty sure it has been standard on most cars in this price bracket for a while now to respond to impacts by shutting off fuel, disconnecting battery terminals and unlocking doors. It varies from model to model, but most premium cars react to emergencies by cutting off as many points of danger as possible. Something doesn't add up here.
Was he drunk? Was he poisoned with a cocktail of drugs that perhaps made him lose concentration and crash into a tree? A new 2013 Mercedes don't just malfunction and crash killing its occupants so easily. They build these cars to withstand a lot of impact, this isn't the movies, new cars don't just crash and explode on impact. You hear of gruesome accidents everyday in vehicles, but you rarely hear of them exploding, mangling in a ball of metal and plastic yes, but rarely exploding. Is there CCTV footage of the minutes before he crashed showing perhaps what happened?
Perhaps a recreation of the accident might help shed some light on what really happened. A computer simulation I am sure would be more than enough, coupled with CCTV footage and you should have a pretty close to accurate simulation of how it all went down and how the car would fare.
If the FBI were interviewing close friends and family, someone needs to come out at least dispelling the suggestion he went crazy or was suffering from paranoia. Because at present, there's nothing to suggest foul play other than speculation. And as usual, we all point fingers and call someone crazy when they claim the FBI is watching them and after all of this PRISM controversy, claims like that don't sound as crazy as they once did...
This is how conspiracy theories are promulgated: propose an preposterous alternate reality and then find real facts wanting in comparison.
In this case the alternate reality is that it is "impossible" to crash recent model year Mercedes unless you intend to. This is obviously preposterous since it's not hard to find reports of such crashes with 5 minutes on Google.
> How does a 2013 model Mercedes Benz with a five star ANCAP safety rating (the highest rating you can get) scoring 35.51 points scored out of 37 (an Australian car safety rating for reference) with more airbags than wheels (8 airbags for those of you playing at home including a curtain airbag that drops in-front of the passenger and driver protecting the head and upper-body from impacting anything) crash into a tree without there even being another vehicle involved?
You are massively confused over what airbags do. They don't do anything at all to reduce the chances that one will drive one's car into a tree. They only come into play AFTER an accident has begun.
Cars crash. Expensive cars crash. Cars catch fire after they crash (certainly not in the majority of cases, but it does happen). I'm a Firefighter/EMT in a department that covers a reasonably affluent area. The vehicle Mr. Hastings was driving would not be unusual around here (and vehicles like it would not be unusual to see in the wrecks we respond to).
Your suggestion that somehow being a late model Mercedes makes it impervious to collisions is just silly. I could run a report of our wrecks over the last year, but I'm sure there have been at least a dozen that involve late model cars like the one in question (from various manufacturers). Two of those included at least one fatality. None of them caught fire (but given the small sample size, that's not surprising, over the last decade I'd guess something like 1 in 50 wrecks I've seen involved a post-crash fire).
Regarding the explosion... I've seen nothing that indicates to me that there was an explosion. People described a loud noise (crashes are loud), and a fire. The video of that fire is completely consistent with a post-crash vehicle fire.
The engine came out of the car and was thrown some distance along the sidewalk.
I don't know how fast you'd have to be going to make that happen, but I would guess 70 or 80 mph.
One possibility suggested upthread is that he fell asleep while driving, and given that it was 4:30am I think we have to admit that that is entirely plausible. The weight of his leg could have pressed the accelerator, and in a car like that he could have been doing 70 pretty quickly.
Of course it's not hard to come up with darker possibilities if you want to. He was drugged... his car was tampered with... whatever. I can't rule these out entirely, and under the circumstances I agree that skepticism and further investigation are warranted, but if I had to bet right now, I'd wager he just fell asleep.
(former firefighter) I would look to local and state police for their reports. Any fatal accident with a possibility of foul play, or obvious foul play (DUI, etc) resulted in us assisting the State Police reconstruction team while they processed the scene, measuring and photographing everything to the millimeter, because once we cleaned it up, there was no going back.
That said, I've also seen plenty of crazy vehicle accidents, including fires, many of which are hard to explain how they could have happened. For example, a car where the entire drivers side was smashed into the back seat from driving into a telephone pole. The driver's survival story? "Thank god i wasn't wearing a seatbelt and my car had a bench seat"... She moved over at the last second.
Lets cool our heads a bit. It's not that "impossible" to crash a modern car with ABS, EBD, TC and ST. I'm a living-breathing evidence to the fact that none of these technologies can do anything if the car hits a paddle of water/sand going too fast around a bend. I'm not saying that this is exactly what happened but do we know that it didn't?
Any number of normal scenarios. An animal on the road is one common one. I have seen a lot of people overcorrect to miss a dog, duck, or other animal on the road. Almost lost an aunt that way (she actually ended up wedged between two trees, a bit to one side and she would have been a goner).
Namely the fact that both of these men were prominent journalists, living in the US, each with 'big stories' they were working on that have not seen the light of day due to their untimely death shortly after proclaiming they were working on said stories.
To compound the dire possibilities, in February the US Justice Department confirmed the existence of legal justification for the assassination of American citizens:
Uh, no. Breitbart was a lot of things, but certainly not a journalist of nearly the same caliber. And given that he claimed to work on "big stories" pretty much all the time, we can take that out of the equation, too.
And your disingenuous argument trying to tie drone attacks into that is an utter disservice to truth. To quote from the fine article: "could target a citizen if he was a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda involved in plots against the country and if his capture was not feasible."
Whatever your position on this is, you need to stretch mightily to make this into "the government is indiscriminately killing people it doesn't like".
So please remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And try to bring at least the tiniest bit of evidence to a post that's rather light on them.
Was Breitbart a prominent journalist? I had to look his name up I did not recognize it. After comparing their respective wikipedia pages[1][2] it does not seem that they were equally prominent but I could be missing something.
I am all for connecting the dots and considering ALL POSSIBILITIES but it seems that after a certain point you need to eliminate some of the possibilities when they do not match up with reality. The RT story about the coroner and arsenic seems to be fringe conspiracy theory material that does not stand up well to scrutiny. It seems that the coroner mentioned in the RT story was not involved in Breitbart's autopsy:
"Those theories were quickly debunked by both the L.A. police and Deputy Chief Coroner Ed Winter, who told The Daily Beast at the time that Cormier had nothing to do with Breitbart’s autopsy"[3]
"L.A. County Coroner's Assistant Chief Ed Winter tells LA Weekly that Cormier did not conduct Breitbart's autopsy. "Only doctors" ever worked on Breitbart, says Winter, because foul play was not suspected from the beginning."[4]
* These attacks were demonstrated on a "moderately
priced late model sedan" which is surely a bit of a different situation than a brand new luxury car.
That could mean more sophisticated systems and likely less time to reverse engineer - assuming you don't believe the manufacturer is complicit.
* On page 5 and 6 they describe the work necessary to pull the exploits off. They dumped over two dozen ECUs, desoldering them where necessary and, if I'm not mistaken - reverse engineered them and injected the code which was necessary to support the follow-on attacks.
Assuming the same type and method of attack, the attacker would have had to succesfully generate attack knowledge for a 2013 model-year car then gain intimate physical access to the vehicle to seed the exploits before eventually remotely exploiting them.
That reads like a tall order to me, but it could be the opposite. I could certainly imagine newer, increasingly connected vehicles being more exploitable.
Well, page 6 sounds a lot like the mysterious magic car openers the police have been seeing (compromise the CAN bus through wireless device exploits, use CAN to unlock the doors).
[From the PDF:] To be clear, for every vulnerability we demonstrate, we are able to obtain complete control over the vehicle’s systems.
The latest Fast and Furious movie employes magnetically attached exploit devices that lock the ABS system on a single wheel at speed, causing the car to immediately pull hard in that direction. With an available attack vector, it's depressingly easy.
I've heard about bugs in the throttle position channel from a few coworkers that worked for several different manufacturers. This was awhile ago though and most bugs have been sorted.
Creating a car crash through brake or steering manipulation sounds a bit far fetched. Throttle position on the other hand does not have any type of redundancy in most modern cars (no mechanical means of restoring control). If you have access to change TP, either by GPS coordinates or remote, you could cause a crash pretty easily by sticking the throttle body WFO. The driver always has options to stop the car, but in panic mode...who knows.
I am still withholding judgement and will watch the investigation with interest.
I used to say that people were paranoid who thought the government was spying on them. So I'm not quite ready to dismiss this as a crazy conspiracy just yet.
I thought stealthy black helicopters was the ultimate ridiculous conspiracy theory.. until they crashed one in Pakistan.
I knew the NSA could listen in wherever they wanted, but I thought mass surveillance and storage of all communications was outlandish 1984-like paranoia.. until Edward Snowden.
So.... what? Is the implication here that he was assassinated?
The email doesn't really seem all that panicked to me - I didn't know the guy, so maybe is he being panicked, but it just sounds like a guy who's writing to let people he works with know about possible legal problems.
while this story is about a week old and got lost in all this nsa nonsense, listen to what mr. hastings said before his death. even on tv.
i am german and i can tell you that a mercedes benz DOES NOT just blow up and spit its engine 100yd down the street.
the car wasn't even really against the tree...
sometimes you just need to apply a little grain of common sense, ppl.
It's easy to assume "conspiracy" for everything. Heck, Senator Mark Udall's brother (one of the most-outspoken Senators with the NSA story) has gone missing. You could call that a conspiracy - but it doesn't make it any more true.
I never even heard of Michael Hasting's death before today, so I don't have an opinion yet, but I find it hilarious that someone who is implying that a conspiracy is at work here is telling everyone to "apply a little grain of common sense". Conspiracy theories are not common sense.
At the time it was widely reported that the story he was working on was related to a socialite from Florida named Jill Kelley, but it looks like that isn't true:
As a mechanic, I have never seen any vechicle burn like
that vechicle. I know it has a high pressure EFI system, but it has one way valves and other safety features. It looked like someone poured lighter fluid throughout the car. I imagine the Government has access to odorless flamable fluid?
As the my own paranoia, I am not thrilled about even talking
about this incident. I'm definetly more concerned about
privacy since the NSA reporting. I am also using DuckDuckGo, but it's horrid right now.
I thought the best way to murder a person is to make him disappear and that should be pretty easy for an assassinate from the most powerful government. "Off the radar" would be convenient.
Another possibility is that he had a nervous breakdown or substance abuse episode, leading to both the paranoid emails and the irrational vehicle operations.
Obviously I'm not saying that's the case, but the extremely irrational driving goes fits a theory of paranoid delusions (brought on by any number of mechanisms), just as the hacked car system goes with about to uncover something big.
Yeah, we really don't know. But I'm extremely uncomfortable by the fact that foul play is a real possibility. We already know that the federal government is operating largely in secret and without regard to the law (their insistence that are indeed following their own secret set of laws doesn't provide me much solace). We already know that various press organizations have been wiretapped. I feel like I've woken up into a country I no longer recognize. How long will it be before people no longer feel safe expressing opinions online?
I don't see why your baseless conjecture about nervous breakdowns and substance abuse should be any more credible than the cause implied by this post. I have seen a lot of people coming up with such alternative explanations, which actually go a long way to avoid a more plausible (if less comfortable) conclusion.
Also, I have seen multiple references to some paranoia that Mr. Hastings supposedly had. When I read his email, I see anything but paranoia. He seems very matter-of-fact and even jokes about the investigation. Also, here is a man who had already broken a massive story about a powerful figure and who was in the business of going after such massive stories. Sudden bouts of paranoia wouldn't seem consistent or productive in his line of work.
I take exception to that word because it's dismissive. It seeks to paint him as somehow irrational or the cause of his own demise, while simultaneously waiving the notion that there could be outside involvement. It asserts that of course every element of the government is always good in every situation, such that any concerns to the contrary must be paranoia. It is a very insidious use of language.
Or, an even less interesting possibility: Hastings might in fact have been under some kind of investigation; he might have not slept well the prior night; and he might have fallen asleep at the wheel. This is consistent with the facts of the case: the crash happened in the middle of the night, just after Hastings sped through a red light.
This first question that comes to mind is what was he doing driving at 4:30 in the morning.
His friends describe him as a "grandma diver" so why was he driving so fast and blowing red lights on a residential street? Did he ever display this type of behaviour before?
Another question is.. how does a well made car burst into flames so quickly.
may be wise to immediately request legal counsel before any conversations or interviews about our news-gathering practices or related journalism issues.
"Obviously I'm not saying that's the case,"
Even saying it's likely takes sheer powers of rationalization I can't even fathom. And bringing up just that is what it is. This is like saying "no offense, but" and then saying something offensive.
> Another possibility is that he had a nervous breakdown or substance abuse episode, leading to both the paranoid emails and the irrational vehicle operations.
Ah, but that spin is highly unlikely to generate buzz among moronic internet detectives, and therefore no responsible journalist will deal with such a trite story.
>Another possibility is that he had a nervous breakdown or substance abuse episode, leading to both the paranoid emails and the irrational vehicle operations.
He was a seasoned journalist. Working on a very dangerous case (as he has done in the past, annoying many).
He might have feared and feel intimidated -- and that might have led to erratic driving and crash.
But he sure knew when and if the FBI talked to his friends and colleagues. And it's not like it's the first time a journalist is crashed (either literally or figuratively) for his work. Gary Webb comes to mind. Ruben Salazar too. And those were more innocent times.
It doesn't say "an electronically signed email" using Hastings' PGP key, it doesn't say it was DKIM signed.
telnet hotmail.com 25
MAIL FROM: [email protected]
RCPT TO: [email protected]
Subject: I'm going out for a walk
I might be some time. Don't come looking for me.
.
^D
[+] [-] DigitalSea|12 years ago|reply
The car has stability control, traction control, ABS, EBD, brake assist and three-point pre-tensioning seatbelts. If you've ever driven a modern BMW, Mercedes or any other premium European vehicle than you'd know it's impossible to crash these things unless you honestly wanted to crash them. I am pretty sure it has been standard on most cars in this price bracket for a while now to respond to impacts by shutting off fuel, disconnecting battery terminals and unlocking doors. It varies from model to model, but most premium cars react to emergencies by cutting off as many points of danger as possible. Something doesn't add up here.
Was he drunk? Was he poisoned with a cocktail of drugs that perhaps made him lose concentration and crash into a tree? A new 2013 Mercedes don't just malfunction and crash killing its occupants so easily. They build these cars to withstand a lot of impact, this isn't the movies, new cars don't just crash and explode on impact. You hear of gruesome accidents everyday in vehicles, but you rarely hear of them exploding, mangling in a ball of metal and plastic yes, but rarely exploding. Is there CCTV footage of the minutes before he crashed showing perhaps what happened?
Perhaps a recreation of the accident might help shed some light on what really happened. A computer simulation I am sure would be more than enough, coupled with CCTV footage and you should have a pretty close to accurate simulation of how it all went down and how the car would fare.
If the FBI were interviewing close friends and family, someone needs to come out at least dispelling the suggestion he went crazy or was suffering from paranoia. Because at present, there's nothing to suggest foul play other than speculation. And as usual, we all point fingers and call someone crazy when they claim the FBI is watching them and after all of this PRISM controversy, claims like that don't sound as crazy as they once did...
[+] [-] snowwrestler|12 years ago|reply
In this case the alternate reality is that it is "impossible" to crash recent model year Mercedes unless you intend to. This is obviously preposterous since it's not hard to find reports of such crashes with 5 minutes on Google.
[+] [-] tzs|12 years ago|reply
You are massively confused over what airbags do. They don't do anything at all to reduce the chances that one will drive one's car into a tree. They only come into play AFTER an accident has begun.
[+] [-] JshWright|12 years ago|reply
Your suggestion that somehow being a late model Mercedes makes it impervious to collisions is just silly. I could run a report of our wrecks over the last year, but I'm sure there have been at least a dozen that involve late model cars like the one in question (from various manufacturers). Two of those included at least one fatality. None of them caught fire (but given the small sample size, that's not surprising, over the last decade I'd guess something like 1 in 50 wrecks I've seen involved a post-crash fire).
Regarding the explosion... I've seen nothing that indicates to me that there was an explosion. People described a loud noise (crashes are loud), and a fire. The video of that fire is completely consistent with a post-crash vehicle fire.
[+] [-] ScottBurson|12 years ago|reply
I don't know how fast you'd have to be going to make that happen, but I would guess 70 or 80 mph.
One possibility suggested upthread is that he fell asleep while driving, and given that it was 4:30am I think we have to admit that that is entirely plausible. The weight of his leg could have pressed the accelerator, and in a car like that he could have been doing 70 pretty quickly.
Of course it's not hard to come up with darker possibilities if you want to. He was drugged... his car was tampered with... whatever. I can't rule these out entirely, and under the circumstances I agree that skepticism and further investigation are warranted, but if I had to bet right now, I'd wager he just fell asleep.
[+] [-] jaredstenquist|12 years ago|reply
That said, I've also seen plenty of crazy vehicle accidents, including fires, many of which are hard to explain how they could have happened. For example, a car where the entire drivers side was smashed into the back seat from driving into a telephone pole. The driver's survival story? "Thank god i wasn't wearing a seatbelt and my car had a bench seat"... She moved over at the last second.
Seatbelts don't always save lives...
[+] [-] icandownvote|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smackfu|12 years ago|reply
OTOH, they do absolutely nothing if you are inattentive for a moment at high speed, run off the road, and there is a tree in the way.
[+] [-] mrschwabe|12 years ago|reply
http://rt.com/usa/coroner-arsenic-death-breitbart-456/
Namely the fact that both of these men were prominent journalists, living in the US, each with 'big stories' they were working on that have not seen the light of day due to their untimely death shortly after proclaiming they were working on said stories.
To compound the dire possibilities, in February the US Justice Department confirmed the existence of legal justification for the assassination of American citizens:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/us/politics/obama-orders-r...
Not drawing conclusions here, but I think it's important in this day and age to be diligent in connecting dots and evaluating ALL possibilities.
[+] [-] groby_b|12 years ago|reply
And your disingenuous argument trying to tie drone attacks into that is an utter disservice to truth. To quote from the fine article: "could target a citizen if he was a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda involved in plots against the country and if his capture was not feasible."
Whatever your position on this is, you need to stretch mightily to make this into "the government is indiscriminately killing people it doesn't like".
So please remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And try to bring at least the tiniest bit of evidence to a post that's rather light on them.
[+] [-] dfc|12 years ago|reply
I am all for connecting the dots and considering ALL POSSIBILITIES but it seems that after a certain point you need to eliminate some of the possibilities when they do not match up with reality. The RT story about the coroner and arsenic seems to be fringe conspiracy theory material that does not stand up well to scrutiny. It seems that the coroner mentioned in the RT story was not involved in Breitbart's autopsy:
"Those theories were quickly debunked by both the L.A. police and Deputy Chief Coroner Ed Winter, who told The Daily Beast at the time that Cormier had nothing to do with Breitbart’s autopsy"[3]
"L.A. County Coroner's Assistant Chief Ed Winter tells LA Weekly that Cormier did not conduct Breitbart's autopsy. "Only doctors" ever worked on Breitbart, says Winter, because foul play was not suspected from the beginning."[4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_%28journalist...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart
[3] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/30/no-answers-...
[4] http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2012/04/andrew_breitbart_...
[+] [-] res0nat0r|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stfu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incision|12 years ago|reply
To what end?
At a glance:
* These attacks were demonstrated on a "moderately priced late model sedan" which is surely a bit of a different situation than a brand new luxury car.
That could mean more sophisticated systems and likely less time to reverse engineer - assuming you don't believe the manufacturer is complicit.
* On page 5 and 6 they describe the work necessary to pull the exploits off. They dumped over two dozen ECUs, desoldering them where necessary and, if I'm not mistaken - reverse engineered them and injected the code which was necessary to support the follow-on attacks.
Assuming the same type and method of attack, the attacker would have had to succesfully generate attack knowledge for a 2013 model-year car then gain intimate physical access to the vehicle to seed the exploits before eventually remotely exploiting them.
That reads like a tall order to me, but it could be the opposite. I could certainly imagine newer, increasingly connected vehicles being more exploitable.
[+] [-] ynniv|12 years ago|reply
[From the PDF:] To be clear, for every vulnerability we demonstrate, we are able to obtain complete control over the vehicle’s systems.
The latest Fast and Furious movie employes magnetically attached exploit devices that lock the ABS system on a single wheel at speed, causing the car to immediately pull hard in that direction. With an available attack vector, it's depressingly easy.
[+] [-] mehmehshoe|12 years ago|reply
Creating a car crash through brake or steering manipulation sounds a bit far fetched. Throttle position on the other hand does not have any type of redundancy in most modern cars (no mechanical means of restoring control). If you have access to change TP, either by GPS coordinates or remote, you could cause a crash pretty easily by sticking the throttle body WFO. The driver always has options to stop the car, but in panic mode...who knows.
I am still withholding judgement and will watch the investigation with interest.
[+] [-] darkchasma|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ImprovedSilence|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maaku|12 years ago|reply
I knew the NSA could listen in wherever they wanted, but I thought mass surveillance and storage of all communications was outlandish 1984-like paranoia.. until Edward Snowden.
Now I don't know what to think.
[+] [-] quackerhacker|12 years ago|reply
Wanted to share this since there was alot of great opinions about what happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5943251
[+] [-] meepmorp|12 years ago|reply
The email doesn't really seem all that panicked to me - I didn't know the guy, so maybe is he being panicked, but it just sounds like a guy who's writing to let people he works with know about possible legal problems.
[+] [-] glasz|12 years ago|reply
i am german and i can tell you that a mercedes benz DOES NOT just blow up and spit its engine 100yd down the street. the car wasn't even really against the tree...
sometimes you just need to apply a little grain of common sense, ppl.
[+] [-] JshWright|12 years ago|reply
The car didn't blow up, it caught fire. That's not common, but it does happen. Same with the engine getting tossed... Not common, but it happens.
I've seen both scenarios a handful of times (and surprisingly enough, they have a high correlation with fatalities).
[+] [-] uptown|12 years ago|reply
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/07/01/mark-...
[+] [-] eridius|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ForrestN|12 years ago|reply
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/michael-hastings-ji...
I won't pretend I read all of his work, but whenever I saw his name attached to something I was impressed. For example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3eKaXVe-7A
[+] [-] dano416|12 years ago|reply
As the my own paranoia, I am not thrilled about even talking about this incident. I'm definetly more concerned about privacy since the NSA reporting. I am also using DuckDuckGo, but it's horrid right now.
[+] [-] NatW|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kposehn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fixxer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kailuowang|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisAntaki|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenjackson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeyouse|12 years ago|reply
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/la-coroner-ids-body-journalis...
[+] [-] Angostura|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] corresation|12 years ago|reply
Obviously I'm not saying that's the case, but the extremely irrational driving goes fits a theory of paranoid delusions (brought on by any number of mechanisms), just as the hacked car system goes with about to uncover something big.
[+] [-] sage_joch|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unclebucknasty|12 years ago|reply
Also, I have seen multiple references to some paranoia that Mr. Hastings supposedly had. When I read his email, I see anything but paranoia. He seems very matter-of-fact and even jokes about the investigation. Also, here is a man who had already broken a massive story about a powerful figure and who was in the business of going after such massive stories. Sudden bouts of paranoia wouldn't seem consistent or productive in his line of work.
I take exception to that word because it's dismissive. It seeks to paint him as somehow irrational or the cause of his own demise, while simultaneously waiving the notion that there could be outside involvement. It asserts that of course every element of the government is always good in every situation, such that any concerns to the contrary must be paranoia. It is a very insidious use of language.
And beyond that, it just makes no sense.
[+] [-] simonster|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyck|12 years ago|reply
His friends describe him as a "grandma diver" so why was he driving so fast and blowing red lights on a residential street? Did he ever display this type of behaviour before?
Another question is.. how does a well made car burst into flames so quickly.
[+] [-] PavlovsCat|12 years ago|reply
may be wise to immediately request legal counsel before any conversations or interviews about our news-gathering practices or related journalism issues.
"Obviously I'm not saying that's the case,"
Even saying it's likely takes sheer powers of rationalization I can't even fathom. And bringing up just that is what it is. This is like saying "no offense, but" and then saying something offensive.
[+] [-] _pmf_|12 years ago|reply
Ah, but that spin is highly unlikely to generate buzz among moronic internet detectives, and therefore no responsible journalist will deal with such a trite story.
[+] [-] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
Something very plausible and easy to think -- even in cases where it is not the case. Which reminds me: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137363/
He was a seasoned journalist. Working on a very dangerous case (as he has done in the past, annoying many).
He might have feared and feel intimidated -- and that might have led to erratic driving and crash.
But he sure knew when and if the FBI talked to his friends and colleagues. And it's not like it's the first time a journalist is crashed (either literally or figuratively) for his work. Gary Webb comes to mind. Ruben Salazar too. And those were more innocent times.
[+] [-] natmaster|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guelo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjambassador392|12 years ago|reply
I'm so glad that these kind of pieces are being upvoted here so we can finally stop talking about all that technology bullshit.
Upvote on the left if you agree.
[+] [-] andyl|12 years ago|reply
So - who was interviewed? What questions were asked?
[+] [-] lesslaw|12 years ago|reply
It doesn't say "an electronically signed email" using Hastings' PGP key, it doesn't say it was DKIM signed.