> The cops have every right to remove someone disruptive from a private event like that.

Clinton was in the middle of a speech -- of a sentence! -- demanding that foreign governments allow their citizens the freedom of expression. If you don't see the hypocrisy in that, can you at least appreciate the irony? Did she mean expression should only be protected if it is not disruptive to anybody?

And in this case "disruptive" would have to be defined as standing silently (admittedly this is according to McGovern himself, though it is largely corroborated by the video as the mic had no problem picking up the noise once he started struggling with the police).

You find it suspicious that no one else at the event has publicly corroborated McGovern's story -- but it is also notable that no one else has contradicted it (including the camera).

I don't know what you mean when you say the police had 'every right', but if you mean legal right then I agree. But that is exactly the hypocrisy the whole fiasco makes apparent: when a public official speaks at a private university about the importance of protecting the freedom of expression, the police can and will repress peaceful protesters!

If you meant moral rights, I disagree (based on the facts as best as I can discern them) that the police had any right to remove McGovern the way they did.

Anyway, I think you have healthy skepticism and appreciate your desire not to jump to inaccurate conclusions. I just think the evidence is fairly convincing in this case... and it fits with my pre-conceived notion that governments are prone to hypocrisy :)

> He's a 911 "truther". [911truth.org] He may have been a good CIA analyst, but he's either playing up the nutjobs for money or he is one himself.

I understand your skepticism, but to dismiss him as a "nutjob" because he holds to theories that you and I find incredible is a rather black-and-white approach to assessing the credibility of the story. Dan Ellsberg is on the list in the link you posted; does that give you serious doubts about the validity of the Pentagon Papers?

> At the very least, you should be skeptical when literally the only account you can find of an event in a room full of people comes from one man

I agree, and I wish I could find more accounts of the event. It seems that Amy Goodman and Democracy Now was the most mainstream program to cover it. Though much of it was captured on video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-Vy8fFnz18

Ray McGovern is also the guy who stood up to Rumsfeld in 2006:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1FTmuhynaw

The internets have jaded me to the point that whenever I see someone written off as "a total nut-job" (as the GP did to McGovern) I almost automatically read it as "a principled person who I disagree with."

That just shows how much more secure Schneier's site is than Reddit.

It's called FOAF+SSL :)

But Facebook allows you to have a list of friends, which you can use to grant granular access control to information.

A decentralized, RESTful solution exists as FOAF+SSL.

What would be awesome is if popular social sites like Facebook would generate a FOAF file/Web ID for their users automatically. Then users of those sites would also be part of the open social graph (you know, the World Wide Web) and they would still look at the ads on facebook when they update their statuses or whatever you do on facebook. Win-win.

You mean: Piracy? Yaarrrrgh.