MIT Police Suspended For Trashing Student Newspaper
from the and-the-online-version? dept
Apparently, two police officers at MIT have been suspended after they decided that students at the university shouldn't see a front page story about another MIT police officer caught dealing drugs -- so they dumped hundreds of copies of the paper in the trash (well, actually a recycling bin -- they may want to censor, but not clog landfills, apparently). Of course, it really makes you wonder what they hoped to accomplish. The MIT paper, The Tech, is available online, including the article in question. Throwing out the papers probably did little (if anything) to stop people from reading about the incident -- and simply ended up calling more attention to questionable activities by MIT police. All of this, of course, highlights yet another nice benefit to online newspapers: people can't throw them out to try to hide what's in them.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: journalism, mit, newspapers, police
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Hungry trolls learn best.
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Never talk to a cop, because nothing good will *ever* come of it, and *always* spit in their food.
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Also, you should never spit in anyone's food because that is really nasty and bad for your karma.
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Meh. They can confiscate the server and that takes care of all the non-physical copies. Single points of failure - so annoying. Unless they have some sort of load balancing across geographically distributed systems so readers will get something when the browse to the URL, electronic copies make it easier for a motivated censor to quash the undesirable.
Online newspapers would be advised to throw some copies into the cloud and mail them out directly to subscribers too, if they are sufficiently concerned that an unpopular article might draw the ire of the powerful.
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Deep thought?
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Re: Deep thought?
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Split
bbb
wheatus.com
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In other news...
A spokesman for the GOP funded initiative stated "We are so proud of these boys, it just goes to show what you can do with the proper resources." He went on to say "[the GOP] are busy today, helping create the police force for the election of tomorrow"
Sources close to the college reveal that next year they are planning to expand the course to cover topics such as ordinary rendition and advanced interogation
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