Dept. of Thought-Control

The Orwellian story in real

Brian was caught and arrested on a felony count of planning to cause serious bodily harm or death. Why? Just because that he had copied a short story (pdf) from one of the computers at his school and added some things to it. Wired News is telling the horrific story about Brian Robertson who found a Notepad-file in his webclass and thought it was rather cool and started to write more on it. The story was about "preparations for an armed invasion of his school that included directions to unnamed fellow commandos to kill the senior class principal and then plant plastic explosives around the campus.". But the cops didn't find any weapons or explosives neither in the family car or in the house of Robertson-family.

But the American law is sometimes strange and Brian Robertson was facing a charge that can put him in the slammer ten years. The Oklahoma state statute is making it clear that you can't write things that is threatening on the life and health of people. All this have come into play after the Columbine shootings and the number of kids who have been expelled and jailed for what they have written is tremendous given the fact that it really is a violation of the First Amendment. And as Sara McFall, Robertson's attorney states in court: "If a story describing such things is evidence (of a plan to commit murder), then Stephen King would be serving a life sentence."

The problem is that the law is so badly written that the district attorney is using the case of Brian to revise the statue: "the thing that I am concerned about this statute the most is the way it's written perhaps outlaws thought." he remarks in the briefing from the court.

Robertsons mother: who did think the schools lock-out of her son was good have used almost all of her time trying to defent her son finally did caught the first paragraph which Brian stated not have written. It was in the CD that comes with the installation of Adobe PageMaker...

Wonder if the district attorney is willing to sue the huge company of the dtpapplications...