Assange’s Delightful OkCupid Profile & the State’s Efforts to “Protect Whistleblowers”
December 13th, 2010
Is he your type?
The Senate today unanimously passed S.372, the “Annoy Silver Underground Bloggers Bill,” more commonly known as the “Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act.” It now is heading to the House of Representatives where it will probably pass if the Senate was any indication of its trajectory.
A good way to tell what a piece of legislation will do is to inverse its title. The PATRIOT Act isn’t for patriots. The North American Free Trade Agreement isn’t actually free trade but its opposite: exploitative corporatist filth. The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 will modernize your ability to make choices about what food you consume, which is to say, it relegates it to the state’s authority.
S.372 is complicated. It effectively removes protections for whistleblowers as affirmed in Drake v. AID and further empowers a bureaucracy to decide which whistleblowing cases can go to trial and which to be dismissed without hearing. It also limits the legal amount of violations able to be disclosed in a protected manner, and much of the more visible protections are contradicted in the fine print, so the ostensible purpose of the bill is actually opposed to its true function.
There is quite a bit of legal jargon necessary to understand exactly what is going on but it’s probably not good. Having the government regulate free speech and “add protections” when they are actively seeking to do the very opposite everywhere else doesn’t really inspire hope in this blogger.
On a brighter note, the giggle factory that is the internet recently discovered Julian Assange’s OKCupid account. It hasn’t been logged into since 2006, but if you “are a spirited, erotic, non-confomist,” maybe you should send him a wink! 
