Ashton Lundeby, a Sixteen-Year-Old American, Has Been Disappeared by Homeland Security
May 6th, 2009UPDATE: This Looks Like a More Conventional Federal Case Now
Via: Wired:
The boy’s mother, Annette Lundeby, has even acknowledged in interviews that her son has been formally charged, has a court-appointed attorney, and has already made appearances in front of a judge.
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Long ago, I took a class called Soviet Society and Culture. One of the many readings was a book called Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya:
The novel opens with Sofia Petrovna, a mother who has recently discovered the joys of a paying job as a typist. Sharing her apartment with several other families or attending mandatory meetings at work – all are simply parts of her daily life as a Soviet citizen, as unquestioned and necessary as brushing one’s teeth or washing dishes. When the purges begin and the director of her office is taken away, even after her own son is arrested, she tries to believe in both the government and in the innocence of people she loves. But as Sofia Petrovna stands in line after line – attempting to gain information, pass along money, plead for her son – she slowly loses her innocence and her sanity. Sofia Petrovna is not Lydia Chukovskaya, but the emotion and experience for the book came from the author’s life, including the arrest and murder of her husband. In this slim novel Lydia Chukovskaya was determined to describe, through the life of an ordinary woman, “an educated society driven to loss of consciousness by lies.”
Flash forward to today. Here’s what the American iteration of this looks like so far:
Via: WRAL:
Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby’s bedroom in his mother’s Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere – on the bed, on the floor, on the wall.
But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.
The family was at a church function that night, his mother, Annette Lundeby, said.
“Undoubtedly, they were given false information, or they would not have had 12 agents in my house with a widow and two children and three cats,” Lundeby said.
Around 10 p.m. on March 5, Lundeby said, armed FBI agents along with three local law enforcement officers stormed her home looking for her son. They handcuffed him and presented her with a search warrant.
“I was terrified,” Lundeby’s mother said. “There were guns, and I don’t allow guns around my children. I don’t believe in guns.”
Lundeby told the officers that someone had hacked into her son’s IP address and was using it to make crank calls connected through the Internet, making it look like the calls had originated from her home when they did not.
Her argument was ignored, she said. Agents seized a computer, a cell phone, gaming console, routers, bank statements and school records, according to federal search warrants.
“There were no bomb-making materials, not even a blasting cap, not even a wire,” Lundeby said.
Ashton now sits in a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind. His mother has had little access to him since his arrest. She has gone to her state representatives as well as attorneys, seeking assistance, but, she said, there is nothing she can do.
Lundeby said the USA Patriot Act stripped her son of his due process rights.
“We have no rights under the Patriot Act to even defend them, because the Patriot Act basically supersedes the Constitution,” she said. “It wasn’t intended to drag your barely 16-year-old, 120-pound son out in the middle of the night on a charge that we can’t even defend.”
Research Credit: pookie, anothernut
And then they came for the upper middle class white kids . . . and a good ole boy to boot.
What will happen now? Will the tide turn back, or will it be just another Rubicon crossed?
I wonder why they chose to apply the Patriot Act, as opposed to lesser, more innocuous statutes, as is usually for people with white privilege.
No my friends, it is not true. They are not coming. They are here.
I wondered whether this story being presented on a commercial news station was something to feel encouraged by or suspicious about.
Then, after reading Lt. Col. Nemo’s reply, I began to wonder if its purpose was to test the public’s response before rolling more of this kind of thing out.
This is the county where my parents own land, and about my only choice for a place to live. *sigh*
Sounds like a VOIP hack.
Was it sniffed out at random?
Only thing I can think of is if the operation is ongoing and they overplayed the VOIP tracking?
Right IP, wrong house?
[become public just how easy VOIP is to track and get it wrong]
Right IP, right house but physical access was needed?
[become public just how easy VOIP is to track to a friend house]
Right IP, right person and its a complex case?
[become public just how easy VOIP is to track and get it ?]
Sounds like the feds dont want anyone thinking too much about VOIP. When people talked of cell phone tracking, bugging –
Costas Tsalikidis, the Greek telco whistleblower who was found hanged. Adamo Bove head of security at Telecom Italia who exposed the CIA renditions via cell phones ‘fell’ to his death.
My view is VOIP tracking was exposed. They want to keep it under wraps for a few months yet???
Better to have the news talking about ‘rights’ and ‘disappeared’ than geeks and nerds about VOIP tracking?
A few months ago, a friend of mine was arrested, along with her husband. Handcuffed, taken to the station, their PCs taken and copied.
Their crime? Nothing.
They had just moved into their new apartment, and were set up with a new IP address by their ISP. The previous owner had made a bomb threat against a school. The Keystone Kops didn’t do their homework (and clearly had no idea of things like proxy surfing and open WIFI networks), and assumed guilt.
One SWAT team attack later…
What shocked me most was the matter of fact reaction by my friend. She told the story as if the jack-booted violation of her rights was amusing.
The notion that people would be hunted down, rounded up, and locked up en masse merely for using certain “controlled” substances must have seemed outlandish before it became a reality.
The Wired piece applied the old “Blogger Unfounded Hysteria Over Civil Liberties” play out of the standard establishment press psy-op play-book. If the corporate media had done their job properly, nobody would have batted an eye. The way it was reported was misleading. If the facts were originally true as presented, it would be worth griping about.
The bloggers function primarily to filter news, not report it. Most of them don’t have the resources or skills to investigate news stories. However, their usefulness as a filter is more than enough. A big part of being informed is filtering out all of the crap that clogs the papers and media channels.
It’s disingenuous to jump on bloggers for calling attention to something like this. They were just doing their job of pointing out a story that contained a serious issue. In any case, I don’t see Wired going out of its way to try and substantiate their claims about the story. Where are the links to .pdf versions of official documents proving it’s a standard case?
As usual, they think it’s more than enough to deliver their standard denunciation.
This is totally awesome sleeze factor bs. Shocking to me that this report has had so many posts. Using the US Patriot Act against its own citizens, surely Kevin, this is a test.
I mean like DUH.