This is part of a change in Federal prison rules to disallow free books-to-prisoners programs.
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As I understand, this is in no small part an attempt (probably doomed to fail) to prevent the smuggling of drugs into prisons.
Valerie Plame got outed as a CIA officer, ending her career and putting her contacts’ lives at risk so that the Bush administration could punish a political critic. That purpose is about as fucking different as one can get from releasing carefully vetted information that’s vital to a functioning democracy and which would have been made public had the Republicans not been so partisan as to put party above country.
Just sayin’…
The usage (and breakage) of these laws is not always equivalent. (See also: The Pentagon Papers.) And I’m not sure how the ballot box fixes it, either.
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I’d rather not have a state with an NSA. They’ve shown countless times that they are not concerned with the security of the American people. I don’t have any patience for NSA shenanigans, and little for NSA shills.
Yes they did. Then I grew up and did not believe in fairy tales anymore.
If those things are true, then yes.
Is that the metric you want to use? It seems to me, when deciding on a punishment, we should stick to what we do know. So, since the answer to all of your questions is “No, we do not know that.” then we can only be justified in applying punishment for what we do know. Justifying punishment based on what we don’t know is about as backwards and brutally authoritarian a position one could possibly take.
Do we know Prentiz didn’t shoot Kennedy? No we don’t. Should we punish Prentiz as if they had because we can’t be sure they didn’t? No, of course not.
I want a state where the NSA does not exist. I also want our whistle blower protections back. Finally, I want a state where this Reality Winner is immediately released from jail, her conviction reversed, and damages paid to her.
Consider this, no one in the “legitimate” channels said anything about the Russian interference before the election yet that intelligence was available. That simple truth illustrates the fact that an argument for going through the legitimate channels is a fallacious one at best and at worst an attempt at legitimizing a cover up concerning a foreign attack on the very foundations of our democracy.
Well. that certainly an ungamable situation. No way anyone could setup a shop on amazon to sell books through their platform which are intended for special audiences.
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We need more information. Some things sold through Amazon’s platform are shipped by the independent sellers, and some things are shipped out of Amazon’s own warehouses.
If “sent direct by Amazon” means only things shipped by Amazon from Amazon’s warehouses, then Amazon—and presumably the government—have a lot more opportunity to control things.
US prison authorities also tightly control the content of prisoners’ reading.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/us/new-jim-crow-book-ban-prison.html
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If that’s the metric to use …
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I think I could live with that!
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