It's not exactly Rashamon, but ...
For the purposes of this column, I'm not really concerned about whether or not
Al-Hussayen is actually guilty, or not - though perhaps I should be. The first
article that I read about the case peaked my interest because it wrote:
During their opening statement in Sami Al-Hussayen's trial at the federal courthouse
in Boise, Idaho, prosecutors put a new spin on the slippery concept of "links to
terrorism." The Idaho Statesman reports that they "displayed a chart" showing how a
Web site that Al-Hussayen had helped maintain "could eventually access 20 other sites
with ties to radical organizations."
Here, obviously, was a striking example of the fact that somebody is some high-up
bureaucratic position simply didn't understand the nature of linking, something
that certainly wasn't lost on the person writing the article:
Talk about guilt by association. Given the interconnected nature of the World Wide Web
(they don't call it a "web" for nothing), just about any site with hyperlinks "could
eventually access" something sinister.
That's just the sort of situation - a fundamental misunderstanding (or misinterpretation)
of what hyperlinks are, of what they do (and don't do) that I collect. If this
wasn't a case of bureaucratic misunderstanding of the technology it was certainly
one of bureaucratic zeal overtaking whatever understanding did exist.
I should note, however, that although Al-Hussayen was judged to be innocent, and
charges dropped, a further investigation into the case suggests that (even though
the law he was accused of breaking is much too vague, and his acquittal definitely
seems to be a victory for civil liberties) this wasn't
as simple a case at it might seem from that first paragraph, and one might reasonably
consider him a candidate for a trial. Coverage of the trial, from various perspectives,
can be found here,
here and
... (am I really making this link?) here.
Go to: Guilt by hyperlink?