Two weeks ago, ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good in cold blood. I said then that we had to abolish ICE and impeach Trump & Noem before they incited another murder.
As more details have emerged, it’s only looked worse. Multiple angles of video showed Good was trying to avoid hitting anyone. Ross, stupidly, stepped in front of her vehicle to film her license plate. The video shows her backing up and turning away from him.
Now the gunshot evidence reveals it was even worse than we knew. Of the three shots Ross fired, only one was fatal: one fired well after her car was clear of him, shooting through the side window. He executed her as she drove away.
The administration lied. They claimed she was aiming to harm ICE agents when she was doing no such thing. They called her a domestic terrorist.
Then Tom Homan made a promise. He claimed that if people didn’t stop calling ICE and CBP murderers, they were just going to have to murder again.
Now they have. In cold blood, they murdered Alex Pretti.
It was an American murder.
Let’s be clear about what Pretti did and did not do. He was not protesting. He was not brandishing a weapon. He had a legal, holstered gun, which he never touched and never sought to grab. His “crime” was helping direct traffic, videotaping what immigration officers were doing, and then moving to help a woman who had been pepper sprayed and knocked down on the ice — even as Pretti himself had been pepper sprayed.
He was helping. That’s all.
And yet, once again, the worst of the Trump administration rushed to blatantly lie. They claimed he was a terrorist. That he came to murder federal officers. That he brandished a weapon. None of that is true.
By all accounts Pretti was a good person — an ICU nurse at the VA hospital, someone about whom there has been an outpouring of stories describing a kind, gentle, helping man. But none of that should matter. If he wasn’t an ICU nurse. If he wasn’t a nice guy. Even if he wasn’t an American citizen. Nothing he did would justify being shot multiple times in the middle of the street.
Incredibly, the party that made the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms” the most consequential and central plank of their entire identity is now trying to claim that merely possessing a legal, holstered gun justifies being murdered by federal agents.
It was an American murder.
Kash Patel went on Fox News and claimed, falsely, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple. You don’t have a right to break the law and incite violence.”
Except that’s bullshit. The MAGA right has a long history of proudly showing up at protests brandishing loaded weapons. Sarah Longwell compiled some examples that make the hypocrisy unavoidable. MAGA doesn’t care. They know they’re lying and they get a thrill from it. It’s a game to them to lie because it “triggers the libs.”
They will justify and celebrate murder so long as they can meme it and parade around how mad it makes empathetic people to see their friends and neighbors murdered.
Hell, Kyle Rittenhouse became a hero of the MAGA right not just for showing up to a protest brandishing a loaded weapon, but for killing people. Kash Patel publicly berated “the left” for not giving Rittenhouse “due process” (which he did, in fact, receive), and now claims that Pretti deserved to be murdered for doing far less.
JD Vance, who has been blaming Minnesota officials because he knows he has to make shit up, once praised Kyle Rittenhouse:
He saw a bunch of thugs and rioters destroying his community, and no one was doing anything about it. You know one of the values that represent my community, if not honor and loyalty and devotion to your community. This 17-year-old boy saw no one protecting the businesses, the people, the community. So he went down there and did it.
It wasn’t even Rittenhouse’s community. He lived in a different state entirely.
Pretti did live in Minneapolis. And he, too, saw thugs and rioters destroying his community. They just happened to be federal agents. And he got murdered for trying to help.
The MAGA world rushed to blame him.
It was an American murder.
A man, a helper, shows up to help. Yes, he’s carrying a gun. But it’s legal to do so. He had it legally. He could carry it legally. He never once sought to use it. Instead, he sought to help people. Help them navigate a crowded street. Help witness the actions of federal agents who were kidnapping and attacking people. Help the woman near him who was pepper sprayed and knocked over.
And he got murdered for it.
Every bit of it is obscene. Every bit of it is unnecessary.
And the rush by Trump officials and their cult-like followers to justify it? That’s American too. The lies, so blatant, so obvious. These people have learned that truth doesn’t matter anymore, so long as they can repeat the lies enough on enough friendly TV networks. They will always have pathetic cult members who will repeat and pass them on.
Renee Good’s final words were “Dude, we’re not mad at you.”
The agent who murdered her responded “fucking bitch” after shooting her through the head.
Alex Pretti’s final words were “Are you okay?” — spoken to someone who needed help.
Some of the agents involved in his murder mock cried “boo hoo” at the people screaming at them for killing a man in the street who did nothing wrong.
Where else but America could you have a helper murdered by federal officials in broad daylight for doing nothing but helping, while carrying a gun he did not brandish?
Where else but America would you see federal officials mock those who were shocked and upset by the murder?
Where else but America would you see federal officials immediately blame the victim for exercising his Second Amendment rights — the same rights those officials claimed to hold sacred?
Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her in broad daylight, shooting her multiple times at close range in the head. She had stuffed animal toys in the glove box of her SUV that rammed into another car after she’d been killed for no reason at all.
We have video of what happened. Multiple angles. The Trump administration is lying about every single detail anyway.
Donald Trump kicked off with a blatant lie, claiming that Good “viciously ran over the ICE officer.”
Known liar, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, called Good a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.”
Kristi Noem made up a complete fantasy:
It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was, our ICE officers were out in enforcement action, they got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis, they were attempting to push out their vehicle, and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.
Not a single one of them is telling the truth. They are flat out lying.
Here’s what actually happened. The folks at Bellingcat put together a top down view showing the murder, pieced together from multiple videos:
Using imagery online of the shooting by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, we’ve created an animated sequence which highlights the approximate positioning of officers and vehicles at the scene. The red dot represents the agent who fired the shots. Yellow dots are other agents who arrived at the scene.
This morning (after equivocating all day yesterday, as I’ll discuss below), the NY Times put out a video using multiple bystander videos, showing that the ICE agent (1) was not hit (2) was not in the path of the vehicle and (3) was absolutely fine afterwards (contradicting claims from the administration that he was run over and in the hospital). See it here:
From all the evidence, it’s clear that Good had stopped and when ICE agents started demanding she move, she started to pull around the ICE vehicle in front of her. She paused to let another vehicle drive by her. As that happened (for no apparent reason) the ICE agent who eventually murdered her walked around the right side of her car to the front. As he does that two other ICE agents approach the car, with one telling her to exit the car while another yells for her to move. She then proceeds to try to drive away from the ICE agents. The one who had stepped in front of her car steps aside and then just starts madly firing at her head.
He murdered her. And Trump and his cronies are lying about it with video evidence directly contradicting every word.
This isn’t the first time ICE has killed someone. This is actually the ninth such shooting by an ICE agent since September, every single one of which involved an ICE agent blatantly violating policy by firing into a vehicle. This is at least the second outright murder, as opposed to attempted murder.
While ICE conveniently took down its page describing this (got something to hide?), the official policy is that “firearms shall not be discharged solely to disable moving vehicles.” Also, “discharging a firearm from a moving vehicle is prohibited.” There are some limited exceptions, but they appear to apply solely to a case where the car is driving directly at an ICE agent.
ICE shouldn’t even be in Minneapolis. It shouldn’t be anywhere. It shouldn’t exist. Nor should it ever have existed, as many of us have warned for many, many years. When we first started writing about ICE over 15 years ago, it was already a lawless organization.
This murder of an American citizen on a quiet street—someone who was just there to observe and monitor ICE agents kidnapping people—exemplifies why ICE is fundamentally incompatible with a free society. We’re talking about a masked federal police force, operating in secret, with no apparent limits, no meaningful rules, and no consequences for violence. They’re engaging in lethal force against anyone—citizens and non-citizens alike—because they’ve been given implicit permission by the White House to do whatever they want. MAGA folks mock the Gestapo comparison, but what else do you call an unaccountable secret police force that operates with impunity, murders citizens in broad daylight, and then lies about it with the full backing of the state?
Further, as detailed in the Court’s factual findings, agents have used excessive force in response to protesters’ and journalists’ exercise of their First Amendment rights, without justification, often without warning, and even at those who had begun to comply with agents’ orders…. While the Court acknowledges that some unruly individuals have been present during these gatherings, their presence among “peaceful protestors, journalists and legal observers does not give Defendants a blank check to employ unrestricted use of crowd control weapons,” and, in many of the instances in which agents deployed less lethal munitions, they did not direct the force anywhere near such bad actors…. Agents’ “use of indiscriminate weapons against all protesters—not just the violent ones—supports the inference that federal agents were substantially motivated by Plaintiffs’ protected First Amendment activity.”
Judge Ellis also called out DHS’s systematic lying—the same pattern we’re seeing now:
While Defendants may argue that the Court identifies only minor inconsistencies, every minor inconsistency adds up, and at some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent
And yes, they will lie in the face of directly contradictory video evidence. Judge Ellis again:
Presumably, these portions of the videos would be Defendants’ best evidence to demonstrate that agents acted in line with the Constitution, federal laws, and the agencies’ own policies on use of force when engaging with protesters, the press, and religious practitioners. Buta review of them shows the opposite—supporting Plaintiffs’ claims and undermining all of Defendants’ claimsthat their actions toward protesters, the press, and religious practitioners have been, as Bovino has stated, “more than exemplary.”
A federal judge warned us six weeks ago that DHS and ICE would likely kill people and lie about it even when video proved them wrong. Yesterday proved her right. Again.
I had a few other stories I planned to write up on Wednesday, not to mention taking care of some other work, and I spent most of the day just unable to do anything, feeling sick to my stomach.
Yes, this happens in America (and elsewhere), but it shouldn’t. This is fucked up.
As 404 Media points out, this has become the standard course of action by the Trump admin these days.
This is a pattern. Some event happens as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, DHS rushes out a misleading, wrong, or incendiary statement that does not reflect reality, and it becomes another piece of ammo for the X.com grifters, right wing media ecosystem, or people who just love the idea of others being hurt.
And, again, why the fuck is ICE even in Minneapolis anyway? Because a small-time MAGA grifter YouTuber made a misleading video a few weeks ago claiming day care centers in Minneapolis were running a scam. His “evidence”? The day cares had locked doors and wouldn’t let him in with his cameras—which is what day cares do when random people show up demanding entry.
Noem is claiming that ICE had to be in Minneapolis based on her lies that the city is “dangerous” and full of “criminals” who don’t belong there. But as multiple people have pointed out there has been only one murder in Minneapolis in 2026.
It was the one committed by this ICE agent yesterday.
The Trump MAGA DHS position is that if you don’t immediately submit in every possible way, they will frame you as a “threat” who they can kill with impunity. Defector’s summary is exactly right:
Now that the Trump administration has shown it will immediately make up a flagrant lie in an attempt to justify the summary execution of a U.S. citizen, on video, in broad daylight—and will outright valorize the ICE agent who drew his pistol and killed a civilian for the crime of moving her vehicle a few feet—the message is clear, to ICE agents and everyone else: Nothing constrains these agents except whatever inhibits any individual one of them, personally, from brutalizing and murdering any person who disobeys them….
In the eyes of the state and its agents, all of the rest of us are walking around with a standing presumption, not just of guilt, but of murderous intent. Anything but total and immediate submission is domestic terrorism. It’s punishable by whatever the masked and unidentified government agent pointing a gun at your face decides to dish out.
And, of course, the compliant media is playing its part. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post initially embraced the view-from-nowhere approach of claiming the events around the shooting are “disputed.”
Come the fuck on. Five hours later and the headline is still about a disputed shooting. Just a basic lack of courage to acknowledge the obvious.
The old journalism joke is that if one person tells you it’s sunny outside and the other says it’s raining, you don’t report that the weather is disputed. You go the fuck outside and check. We have the video here. Multiple angles. It shows exactly what happened. But the Times and Post were treating the administration’s obvious lies as equally valid to the documented evidence because… why? Because acknowledging that a federal agency will murder a citizen and then lie about it in the face of video evidence is too uncomfortable? This isn’t neutral journalism—it’s active complicity in state violence. When the media treats documented murder and transparent lies as a “dispute,” they’re telling every ICE agent that there will be no accountability, no matter how clear the evidence.
Yes, eventually, this morning, both the NY Times and the Washington Post published more thorough investigations, showing that the administration is lying. But they let the “dispute” stand for 24 hours, allowing the administration to set the narrative that will live on. And even now they’re using equivocal language. The Post’s story talks about how the video evidence “raises questions about” what the admin is saying, rather than just coming out and saying that they’re LYING.
And I won’t get into how state media like Fox News is reporting on this: focusing on whatever it could dig up about Good to mock her, as if anything in her personal life or views somehow justifies her being murdered. Or all the GOP elected officials going on TV trying to pretend that she might have deserved to have been murdered in the street.
Yes, I know that in these tribal times so many people are playing the team sports thing of just immediately defending their cult leader. Going on X and looking around, you see just an overwhelming flood of absolute bullshit from MAGA folks cracking jokes (remember when they wanted people fired for joking about Charlie Kirk’s murder?) and trying to spin the story, knowing full well it’s all bullshit.
But some are seeing through it. A neighbor near where the murder happened, who identified himself as “right leaning,” admitted that the situation shook him, as “this is not how we’re supposed to be doing things in America.”
Really worth watching this interview with a bystander who witnessed the ICE shooting in Minneapolis: "I'm pretty right-leaning. But seeing this, this is not how we're supposed to be doing things in America.”
He’s right. And it is beyond disgusting that so many powerful forces in our government and the media are trying to twist and manipulate the story to justify an out of control ICE.
The only appropriate response here is to shut down ICE. Shut down DHS. Yes, there are important and necessary roles in DHS, but they existed without DHS before it was formed two decades ago, and we can redistribute those roles elsewhere in the federal government. But we don’t need ICE. We don’t need a secret federal police that goes around in masks kidnapping and murdering people.
It’s about as un-American as you can imagine.
This murder has at least appeared to wake some politicians from their slumber. We’ve seen multiple Democratic politicians, especially in Minnesota, speak out as forcefully as I’ve seen politicians speak out in years, telling ICE to get the fuck out of Minneapolis and calling out the administration’s lies directly. That matters. When officials with actual power are willing to name the truth—that ICE murdered a citizen and the administration is lying about it—it creates space for others to do the same.
But also thousands came out to memorialize Renee Nicole Good, in the freezing cold in a Minneapolis January. Hundreds turned up at a training session for legal observers, even as hundreds more are already patrolling Minneapolis, observing ICE’s illegal actions, and doing so knowing that ICE and DHS won’t hesitate to shoot them dead.
That’s what a movement looks like when institutions fail. Not waiting for someone to save us, but showing up in the freezing cold to say: you will not do this in our name. You will not kill our neighbors without witness. You will not lie about it unchallenged.
I’m going to leave this post up for a while before we post anything else. This matters more than the usual tech policy stories right now.
There are plenty of things going on that are infuriating. Ever day this administration finds new ways to spit on the Constitution. We’re still dealing with the illegal invasion of Venezuela, and apparent plans to attack multiple other nations around the Western Hemisphere.
But Renee Nicole Good’s murder cuts through all of that noise. A masked federal agent murdered an American citizen in broad daylight for no reason at all. The administration lied about it with video evidence directly contradicting every word. The media called it “disputed.” And thousands of people said no.
The institutional guardrails have failed. The courts warned us this would happen and it happened anyway. The media won’t hold power accountable. So the work falls to us—to show up, to document, to refuse to accept the lies, to make the cost of this violence too high to sustain.
ICE must be abolished. This cannot stand. And anyone who makes excuses for what happened yesterday has chosen a side, and it’s not the side of America or freedom or anything resembling justice.
Renee Nicole Good was a poet, a mother, and a citizen murdered by her own government for the crime of existing near an ICE agent having a bad day. Remember her name. Remember what they did. And remember that they lied about it even with the cameras rolling.
This past weekend has, tragically, been way too much about death for me. On Friday evening I found out that a close relative had just passed away, and had just spent some time talking to other family members, crying, figuring out how I was going to fly across the country for a funeral, etc. I’d finally had enough and was about to shut down and go to sleep, when an email popped up from a friend telling me that Aaron Swartz had killed himself. And, suddenly, there was more death to think about in a very different way. The past few days I’ve been thinking a lot about both my relative and Aaron — two very different people who probably only share the end date of their lives. I’m mourning them both, but since Aaron was a public figure and relevant to what we write about here, I wanted to write something about him, even as the mourning sector of my brain tries to figure out how you grieve for multiple people at the same time.
I did not know Aaron all that well, but I did know him. I’ve been reading many of the stories from those who did know him quite well, and it’s amazingly touching. But I wanted to share my short story, because it’s what keeps running through my mind. In my head, there are a few key moments that I keep thinking about concerning Aaron. One is the first time I met him. I can’t place the exact time, but I think it was a decade ago at a conference in Santa Clara (I remember the hotel well). He was sitting at a table, and wow, did he look young. Very much like the kid in this photo by Richard Gibson, that Aaron posted to his own website, showing himself talking to Larry Lessig back in 2002 — at the age of 15.
I knew back then that he’d been one of the creators of one version of RSS (and that he and Dave Winer didn’t get along because of some disputes over that). And I’d remembered hearing that he was young. But seeing that little kid sitting there was still really surprising. I talked to him very briefly at that event, and was immediately struck by how sharp he was. I also remember him helping to “launch” Creative Commons — and I thought that, at nearly twice his age, I’d done so little.
I started reading his blog soon after that, which was an interesting mix of content from technical to political to philosophical to personal. When he started college, at Stanford, something about his blog posts were both captivating and horrifying at the same time — describing in vivid details the kinds of thoughts many of us have when we go to college for the first time and are trying to figure out how and where we fit into the world. What struck me as so odd was that because of everything else he had done, my mind just defaulted to assuming that he was completely mature in all aspects of his life. But he was still just a kid.
The blog post I most remember came maybe a month or so after he had gotten to Stanford, and it involved him telling the story — again, in both captivating and horrifying detail — about him hooking up with a girl. My memory is fuzzy at this point — and a very cursory spin through his blog doesn’t turn up the post — but I remember her joking about him being famous, which lead to the usual sort of awkwardness that comes with early makeout sessions, but all described in detail. I also vaguely remember some sort of followup, indicating that the girl was mortified about the public reporting on their rendezvous.
It was Aaron, sorting out his life in public. That may be more common these days, but it was certainly relatively new back then, and it was so disjointed from the “profesional” Aaron, who had already accomplished so much. I kept thinking… “that’s right, he’s just a kid.”
But the kid grew up. He left Stanford, he joined the first YCombinator class, he did a startup that didn’t go far, but which eventually led him to joining the early Reddit team. Here and there, he kept popping up, always doing something interesting. The next time I came across him was in 2009, when the FBI investigated him for daring to download a ton of public domain court documents from PACER. While PACER tries to charge $0.10/page (at the time it was $0.08) the documents are still public domain. Many people find this annoying — and Aaron was a true crusader for the right to information. So when he found out that some libraries were experimenting with free PACER access as a trial, he went to one, set up a perl script and had it cycle through tons of documents, downloading them for him to collect. Eventually, the FBI realized it had no case: freely offered access to public domain material is legal to use.
Obviously, that foreshadowed his more recent legal troubles.
Over the last couple years, Aaron and I emailed occasionally. He and I were two of the only people (along with Senator Wyden) who seemed really concerned about the predecessor to SOPA/PIPA called COICA, and he had talked to me about helping get more people aware of the problems of the bill. And then, when SOPA/PIPA came along, we were in touch over the efforts against that (along with many others as well). But I also remember the last two times I heard from Aaron. Last summer, out of the blue, he emailed me to say that he’d run across a minor (but annoying) technical error on Techdirt, and suggested how to fix it. And then, in October, when he finally got his FOIA request returned concerning ICE’s domain seizures, he emailed to let me know. I never communicated with him directly about his own ongoing case, but I remember being both surprised and impressed (and then less surprised once I thought about it) that he’d continued to push forward on his activist causes, even while facing trial for one of them.
The only time I ever met Aaron in person was that one time, a decade ago. I probably emailed with him less than 100 times — with most of those coming over the past couple of years. I always knew he was complex — wise way beyond his years in some things, and still figuring out other things at the same time. But the news of his suicide definitely took me by surprise, though others have pointed out that he’s hinted at such things in the past.
I will also say that I know there’s been a rush to “blame” the lawsuit against him on this. In fact, our September post detailing the new charges against him got a tremendous amount of traffic over the weekend. Aaron’s own family has stated:
“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.”
Just as I was hesitant to blame Lori Drew or Dharun Ravi for actions that were connected to later suicides of people they had taunted, it still feels wrong to say that the case itself led to his suicide, without more details. That said, as Tim Lee noted, knowing Aaron, he would be the first in line to suggest the value of using the circumstances of his own death to get reform of the massively broken Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which he was charged under.
Again, as detailed in our earlier post, as well as an earlier analysis, the case against him was a joke: it involved massive charges for downloading information that was made freely available to the campus network he was on. At best, we could have seen a trespassing citation — but instead he was facing decades in jail and seven figure fines. For accessing information. It really showed a case where the feds seemed to be going after Aaron because they didn’t like him — and, as we’ve seen, when the feds don’t like you, they can make your life hell. JSTOR — the supposedly “harmed” party — wanted nothing to do with the case. The feds just seemed to want to make an example out of Aaron… for the “crime” of wanting access to knowledge. It would be great to see an Aaron Swartz Act to reform the worst parts of the CFAA. It might not be his biggest legacy, but it would be a good one to add to a long list.
Larry Lessig — who knows more about both Aaron and the case against him than most people — has a tremendously powerful post calling out the federal government (and MIT) for their actions in the case against Aaron, suggesting that the feds offered up a plea deal, but Aaron would not take anything that would have him described as a felon. More is going to come out on what happened, I’m sure, and the government is not going to look good.
If you want to read more thoughts on Aaron from people who knew him much better than I, I suggest you read the posts by Cory Doctorow and Danny O’Brien. Also, Mathew Ingram has been curating a list of some of the more interesting remembrances — and a tumblr for Remember Aaron Swartz is filling up with wonderful remembrances.
There are so many sad things about this story, but the biggest is the most obvious: knowing just how much Aaron had accomplished already in his short life, combined with his drive and determination, we’ll now never know how much more he would have accomplished down the road — and every single one of us will lead less fulfilling lives because of that loss. He was still just a kid… a kid who had already accomplished amazing things.
Like many people, I’ve been horrified all weekend reading story of the Utøya massacre in Norway. Although it’s difficult to use such a fresh tragedy to prove a point, a post by Rick Falkvinge looks at why security theater in Norway was ineffective in preventing this tragedy, and how no further ratcheting up of security theater is likely to do much until it reaches ridiculous levels (random, frequent police raids of farms). The key point is the one Falkvinge concludes with:
Benjamin Franklin famously said, that ?a people who gives up its freedom to gain a little security will lose both and deserve neither?. But now that it has been shown in the most gruesome, in-your-face way that we don?t even gain a little security by giving up these freedoms, then why are we doing so?
Norwegian Prime Minister Stoltenberg is absolutely right when he says we must fight antidemocratic lunacy with more democracy and more humanity. His quote from one of the young on Utøya, “if one man can show so much hate, imagine how much love we all can show together“, is one of the most statemanworthy I have seen in my entire life. Both when it came from the young surviving lady right off the island, and from Stoltenberg on repeating it in his official capacity.
It brings me to tears, and to something more important: hope.
As with past tragedies such as this one, we’re already seeing some evidence that some people are using this tragedy as an excuse to ratchet up security theater. Editorials bemoaning the openness in Norway quickly appeared, and officials in other countries, such as the Philippines and Australia, have already used the tragedy to talk about changing security laws and even how such laws could prevent similar incidents from happening there. Of course, some of the laws they’re talking about were already in place in Norway.
Thankfully, as Falkvinge noted at the end of his story, Norwegian politicians (so far) appear to be going in the other direction, noting how the response to such a cowardly (and yes, such a massacre is cowardly) and fear-inducing act is not more cowardice and fear, but openness and love. Hopefully those views continue to predominate in Norway. Giving in to such acts by increasing the culture of fear is actually what killers like Anders Breivik want.
Dennis and I were discussing what to do about it being September 11. To be honest, the events from one year ago still make me numb. This site is a technology site, and not a personal site, so I wasn’t quite sure how or what to put up in this space, but completely ignoring it didn’t seem right either. We added a small ribbon to the header for the day, and many other sites are doing similar things. We thought we might just run through a list of what some popular websites were doing to commemorate the tragic events of last September 11th. Yahoo redesigned their site in a very understated memorial gray. They also put up a great living tribute which is worth surfing through. eBay is running a discussion board. Amazon.com has some very touching drawings and quotes from some very young children. They also put the times of each of the plane crashes across the top. Even the White House has put up a very nice, understated memorial site. While Google and Teoma added a little ribbon, Lycos went all out and put up a front page memorial site that you need to click through to get to the actual search engine. AltaVista also added a ribbon and is scrolling a list of the names of the victims. Feel free to add other sites or personal thoughts in the comments. Update: News.com has an article listing many different sites that have memorials up.
The Washington Post has an article about people trying to save digital communications from people lost in the September 11 tragedy. People are storing emails, keeping voicemails, and even keeping cell phone service active in order to call up and hear the “leave a message” messages of those who were lost. Somewhat creepy, but understandable.
By now, if you haven’t seen any of the various online ways to donate money to the Red Cross, you probably haven’t been surfing the web for the past week. The Red Cross today announced just how helpful these online donations sites have been. Of the $102 million raised in the past week, $36.5 million came from online donations. Not bad, though, I’m sure they could still use more.
Ok. My goal this week is to try to get as back to “normal” as possible, and try to focus on posting technology related stories. I’ve been receiving submissions on non-tech stories, and I apologize to those of you who submitted them, but there are probably much better places for you to submit them. However, I will post this one, which I just came across. For the most part, many politicians have been very good about not politicizing this tragedy, but some simply cannot help it (it’s what politicians do, after all). So, while I’m happy my local Californian politicians are thinking about me as a constituent, I hope they stop trying to twist the events into ways to try to make it seem “more relevant”. Even worse, are those who are using it just to push their own agenda. Here is a great fill-in-the-blank essay on why the tragedy means that everyone must support my politics that seems to be the template for way too many articles I’ve been seeing lately.
While I don’t fault any one or any company for donating anything to help with the tragedy, I do find it interesting that an American company like Microsoft can offer to donate $5 million in cash and $5 million in software/services, while a Taiwanese tech company can offer to donate $100 million. To be honest, I don’t care about the dollar amounts from any of these firms. The proper response would be “we will do anything we can do to help”. Update: The article has now changed the amount to read $1 million instead of $100 million. I wonder if it was just a typo or if the reporter misunderstood the Via offer.
