If the police would ransack my family home after a fire you could probably write the same article. Charred RPi's and lots of computer parts, enough wiring for a new house, lots of chemicals (cleaners, fertilizers, other chemical agents with regular gardening use cases), ultimate survival guide and related parts ("This guy was prepping for something!"). The naming of suspects is just adding insult to injury. If he's in good faith... Anyone could lose it after a house fire plus being named a 'unabomber' by your neighbours.
Emotional distress seems pretty normal after your house burns down and there's plenty of people in our community with hobbies that would be considered odd. Naming suspects in these cases seems so weird from a non-US perspective, there's not even been a court case.
This is terrible. All the news are based on speculation, but they plastered his very-Googlable-name everywhere, only making it harder for him to get a job now.
I honestly can't see anything positive about those articles existing before there's a proper court case.
I never understood the need to name suspects - address and all - in this country.
In my home country suspects that are (or are about to be) charged and convicted with a crime have their last name abbreviated (e.g. Paul S.), which seems completely reasonable to me. You're innocent until proven guilty, for one. But even if you're guilty and convicted, your punishment should be limited to whatever the judge rules it should be.
I don't see the need for public shaming beyond whatever punishment they get in court should they be convicted. When someone is released after a prison sentence they have a right to resume their life. They did their time, after all.
Sorry if I sound like I'm rambling a bit, English is not my native language.
It's about retribution and the idea that lawyers can influence the justice system and let "bad guys" go free. A lot of the states with lax laws around naming people accused of crimes are the same ones still dishing out the death penalty.
>Naming suspects in these cases seems so weird from a non-US perspective, there's not even been a court case.
As I understand it, the original reason for this is to prevent the police from simply making people disappear. It's a public check on what the police and government do to people.
That police should not make people disappear from their families without proper noticing, it would be a starter. I'm not from the USA but I think I can already guess who usually suddenly go missing because the police got them.
I agree it's terrible that the papers named him so early, and I do think we should give him the benefit of the doubt, but given the information out there right now, there is a reasonable chance he actually was making a bomb. It seems to me like people are willing to jump to the opposite conclusion simply because he's "one of us". Let the investigation play its course.
> It seems to me like people are willing to jump to the opposite conclusion simply because he's "one of us".
Because many of us have our own collection of weird oddities. I literally have cannon fuse sitting on the shelf behind me, that I got to make my own smoke bombs/devices (just sugar and potassium nitrate, nothing insane or dangerous). I would take a hard look at the worst thing someone could accuse you of building using the materials you have in your house. If you have any metal piping sitting around, and a nail or screw, that could be turned into a primitive gun. If you have metal piping and anything that burns very quickly like gunpowder, that's a pipe bomb (or pressure cooker). If you have a propane grill and a gun (or anything that could be used as a detonator), that propane tank could cause some serious damage.
I'll grant you, ammonium nitrate isn't a terribly common substance to have around an apartment. I still don't think it's very compelling evidence that he was building a bomb, and weaker evidence that if he was building a bomb, it was to hurt people. Maybe he was just trying to make his own fireworks. He shouldn't be doing that in an apartment, cuz risk of accidental explosions, but it seems hasty to start painting him as a domestic terrorist.
The reason why presumption of innocence is so important is, you don't need a smoke bomb making materials to get the public to think someone is a bomb maker.
Are we forgetting the time a splayed out alarm clock became a national scandal?
You could go into someone's home, pull out a Raspberry PI and some loose jumpers and hold up something that the average citizen thinks of as proof this person is some sort of mainframe hacking nutjob anarchist.
(And more importantly, there are police out there right now who would jump to the same conclusions. See a simple hobbyist electronics bench and take it as something nefarious.)
That's why you don't go around presuming people are guilty of things.
You've made the point about the clock several times, but it's kind of dishonest. Anyone who actually takes a look at the photos of what the "clock" looks like will immediately think it looks like a bomb. Now imagine ANYone, literally anyone, doesn't matter what race or what skin color, taking that around school and showing it off to teachers or other random people who won't know any better when they see it and get spooked, and for good reason. It could've been the last thing they ever see. They are lucky it was just some kid's joke clock this time.
You're clearly missing the point, if you've read so many of my comments then you've seen my point about the raspberry pi...
The point is laypeople don't know what bombs or basic electronics look like. And why should they when there are pictures of TV shows using CPU coolers to represent bombs and computer power supplies to represent hard drives?
> Anyone who actually takes a look at the photos of what the "clock" looks like will immediately think it looks like a bomb
Kind of makes my point. You realize the thing was in a pencil box, not some full size briefcase? The most common image used:
doesn't actually convey the actual scale of it, the thing was barely larger than the original alarm and maybe an inch thick.
If you found this in a train unattended it'd be one thing, but the student says it's an alarm clock, anyone with a modicum of electronics knowledge would immediately look at it and say "yes that's an alarm clock". Which is exactly what both teachers did.
No one ever thought it was an actual bomb, the confusion was the intent behind it since Texas has a law about hoax bombs that treats them seriously based on intent not just appearance.
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And more generally I bring it up because it should show, laypeople are easy to convince of guilt if your standards are literally adding "allegedly" to every claim.
People in general are vastly overestimate their own reliability and underestimate their suggestibility. It takes a few weasel words to fool people into creating alternate realities so far and away from reality they almost seem absurd compared to the truth, yet they're absolutely convicted about them.
See, here's the thing. If I make comments implicitly about going to shoot up the neighborhood school, even though I didn't do it yet, do you presume me innocent and leave me alone? No, it's going to be investigated and I'll likely get a nice greeting from some men in black soon after.
This wasn't some genius, novel clock that kid invented. He put the internals of a clock into a very specific kind of pencil case to bring around school to show people until it was confiscated by a teacher due to the very fact that it looked like a bomb. So don't tell me that no one thought it was an actual bomb. That doesn't matter. It's not the best example for what you want to say about presumption of innocence - which I agree with you on by the way.
> If I make comments implicitly about going to shoot up the neighborhood school, even though I didn't do it yet, do you presume me innocent and leave me alone?
If you don't make those comments to me, and a news story is making the call that your comments were about shooting up a school, I'll presume you're innocent.
That's literally what this is about. You're not an investigator, you're not sitting on the case files for every story you see. No one is expecting you to have the same standards as a court for what guilty is, but you should still internalize some concept of innocent until proven guilty
Because the news can, and will, and does paint people as criminals when they did nothing wrong. Now a days literally all it takes is saying "so and so person was arrested for allegedly committing so and so crime".
That's it.
People don't need any more proof than that, and the fact that this entire conversation is happening when the investigation into the materials was almost 2 months ago by an NYPD Counterterrorism unit and the FBI, yet this guy is still walking around is pretty damn strong evidence that nothing more came of it, should be proof.
Tour standard of guilty should be much more than a simple news story.
A news story mentioning saltpeter and prepper books is nothing. The kind of people who experiment with saltpeter are exactly the kinds of people to read those books out of interest, not some sort of malicious plan to commit crimes.
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Also this is an aside but...
> So don't tell me that no one thought it was an actual bomb. That doesn't matter.
That's literally the crux of the matter. That's literally all that matters. That no one thought it was an actual bomb, and he didn't act like it was an actual bomb.
If both teachers immediately realized it wasn't a bomb, how are you claiming it looked like a bomb?
It didn't look like a bomb. It looked like an electronic thing splayed out, they asked what it was, he said alarm clock.
The second teacher knew it didn't look like a bomb, what happened is they presumed that he was trying to make it appear like a bomb. No one thought it was a bomb because it didn't look like one.
>His English teacher thought the device resembled a bomb, confiscated it, and reported him to the school's principal. The local police were called, and they questioned him for an hour and a half.
I misremembered the case and forgot it was the police who realized it wasn't a bomb but were trying to prove intent by interrogating him due to Texas's hoax bomb laws...
but exactly like I said above that's an aside, and the entire story just shows how little people understand of the appearance of these things if anything.
If all it takes to convince laypeople to call police on a child is a splayed out alarm clock, how many electronics hobbyists have more than enough contraptions for someone to go on record as saying "I saw a bunch of really suspicious stuff on his desk" after a fire?
I agree, it's pretty bad. But I don't think it's on the laypeople. The English teacher did the right thing. Could they live with themself knowing they could've stopped a real bombing that killed people? The problem isn't that people will call the police based on some suspicions they have in order to protect others in their community or cooperating with law enforcement and telling them what they know and have observed. What else to do?
If the teacher thought it was a real bomb do you think they would have waited until after class and walked it down to the principal's office? The school would have been evacuated before the police got to interrogating him.
The teachers said it looked like a bomb, but even they did not think it was a bomb, again the trouble came down to the hoax law, not someone thinking he had an actual bomb
> I'll grant you, ammonium nitrate isn't a terribly common substance to have around an apartment. I still don't think it's very compelling evidence that he was building a bomb, and weaker evidence that if he was building a bomb, it was to hurt people. Maybe he was just trying to make his own fireworks. He shouldn't be doing that in an apartment, cuz risk of accidental explosions, but it seems hasty to start painting him as a domestic terrorist.
For what it's worth, I fully agree with this. All I'm saying is, we shouldn't outright dismiss the possibility that he was building a bomb, simply because he's an open source developer.
You realize the concept of innocent until proven guilty is not a unique concept to HN readers right?
That presumption of innocence is not "act like maybe he was making bombs until proven guilty"?
It sounds like you've let the media erode your understanding of a very basic human right, but do not try and cast it on others as some sort of tribalism.
He is innocent until proven guilty.
Not "reasonable chance" according to your random opinion, but a judge and jury and various council go through a legal case and legally find him guilty.
> He is innocent until proven guilty ... Not "reasonable chance" according to your random opinion, but a judge and jury and various council go through a legal case and legally find him guilty.
If someone is running towards you with a knife shouting religious scripture, are you going to stand still and think to yourself "I'm going to assume this person is innocent until they are convicted of my murder in a court of law"? No, you're going to consider the possibility that they actually might intend to murder you, and you'll take appropriate precautions.
Innocent until proven guilty is a concept for the court of law, not for the court of public opinion. People are allowed to hold opinions and thoughts regarding how dangerous other people are.
Is the court of public opinion what makes you run away from someone coming at you with a knife?! Is a compelling article using stinging quotes what makes you think a knife coming at you is going to be a bad thing?
They're completely non-comparable concepts. It's such an embarrassingly lazy strawman I can't believe you bothered to waste words on it, and it's silly I should have to respond to it.
Innocent until proven guilty is not a concept born for the sake of legal rigor... it's born of the fact that "court of public opinion" is easily swayed by nonsense. It's largely seen as detracting from the proper functioning of an actual impartial justice system which is why we go to such great lengths to isolate jurors in major cases and why some countries don't even publish people's information this easily.
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So many comments are replying trying to say "there's nothing that legally requires me to assume people are innocent!!!"
That's not a clever argument, there's no legal requirement to be a free-thinking person.
But as I pointed out before, the same way a literal alarm clock splayed out in a box became a national scandal, the burden of proof for the media to sensationalize anything is embarrassing low.
Someone could have a picture taken of a simple hobbyist electronics bench and most people would see it as some sort of mad scientist's electronics lab.
Use your brain cells of a second and think of the context. Someone running at you with a knife? Where the hell does public opinion come into it?
Someone asking for money for thousands of hours of free work that they've done after their apartment burns down and they're left homeless?
And you want to protest that because the Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism of the entire NYPD found some unmixed materials and some reading materials and felt:
> the totality of the circumstances that raised our concern to a level where we're going to need more investigation
Really?
If a deputy commissioner of counterterrorism is saying "we're just worried enough to look into it" almost 2 months ago and the guy is still out here on the street, you really think you have a leg to stand on protesting the guy getting some money to not be homeless?
This honestly feels like inverse-concern baiting. The man is asking for money and about to go homeless after spending a good chunk of his life doing free work used by multi billion dollar corporations.
Trying to go "oooOOooOo he might be a terrorist!!!" over this weak of an indictment is the height of something so insulting, the words to describe it escape me.
> Someone running at you with a knife? Where the hell does public opinion come into it?
Look, you decided to build your entire argument on this extreme form of innocent-until-proven-guilty-nonsense. So I took an extreme example to demonstrate to you that your position was too strong. Let me try to explain in more detail: if you must assume that "everyone is innocent" until they are proven guilty in a court of law, then clearly you would assume that the man charging at you with a knife has no intention of committing a crime, right? Since you assume that they are entirely innocent, then there is no risk of being murdered, so you would not try to run away, right? Can you see how that doesn't make sense? Clearly you would try to run away from someone running at you with a knife, and that's because you have no obligation (legal or otherwise) to assume that everyone is innocent. It's okay to assign probabilities to different events, including crimes that people may or may not commit.
If you didn't take the extreme position to begin with, we wouldn't have to go over extreme examples to demonstrate why your extreme position was wrong. Anyway, I'm going to assume that we both now agree that there is no obligation to assume people are innocent until proven guilty. If you still disagree, please explain how this obligation should work out in the context of the knifeman attack.
> ...the same way a literal alarm clock splayed out in a box became a national scandal...
...but this was not an alarm clock. This was ammonium nitrate (among other stuff). Ammonium nitrate is used for fertilizer and explosives. Was he a farmer? No. So either he was intending to use it for explosives, or he was running some chemistry experiments or something. Can you see how this is different from the possession of an alarm clock?
For what it's worth, I think the most likely explanation for the stuff found is that he was geeking out some harmless experiments. I think the second most likely explanation is that he was going to build bombs and blow stuff up in the forest for fun. I don't think it's likely that he intended to hurt people in bombs, because it's extremely rare for people outside warzones to hurt other people with bombs. But it's definitely within the realm of possibility, and it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
> Someone asking for money for thousands of hours of free work that they've done after their apartment burns down and they're left homeless?
I'm not calling for any fundraisers to be shut down, and I'm not admonishing people for donating money. Even if he intended to hurt people with bombs (which he probably didn't), I think the world is going to be a better place if people donate money and help him get on his feet. Let's hope that the investigation can clear him innocent of any suspicions, and that this doesn't loom over his job search in the future.
> Look, you decided to build your entire argument on this extreme form of innocent-until-proven-guilty-nonsense.
This is complete and utter nonsense. In your own damn comment you're saying:
"For what it's worth, I think the most likely explanation for the stuff found is that he was geeking out some harmless experiments."
In your own goddamn comment you're saying your primary thought is this was innocent experimentation.
When someone is running at you with a knife is the thought "this person is going to harm me" a tertiary thought?
You realize it's not illegal to own any of the materials he had or to experiment with them? The reckless endangerment charge is not just for having them but for having a box catch fire after storing it near a stove?
Your entire comment is essentially "I have no objection to anything you actually said I said but I still want to build a strawman to tear down"
I mean
> This was ammonium nitrate (among other stuff). Ammonium nitrate is used for fertilizer and explosives.
Where the HELL did you see him have Ammonium Nitrate? Don't tell me you read POTASSIUM Nitrate... literally saltpeter you can order of Amazon right now with next day shipping... and thought it was AN. It'd just drive home how precious little you know of the topic and hand and how your serious of comments literally is just concern-baiting that we're jumping way too quickly to treat an innocent person as innocent...
> Your entire comment is essentially "I have no objection to anything you actually said I said but I still want to build a strawman to tear down"
I laid out very specific objections to very specific claims made by you. In particular, I used the knife attack example to demonstrate that - contrary to what you claimed - "innocent until proven guilty" is not an obligation that people must apply to their thoughts and opinions. And I very specifically asked "If you still disagree, please explain how this obligation should work out in the context of the knifeman attack." Based on your tone I get the impression you're still holding on to your extreme belief about "innocent until proven guilty", but you're not willing to reconcile it with this example. Instead, you're trying to weasel out with vague claims about strawmanning. You know, if someone actually was strawmanning, you would be able to point out how the strawman is different from the actual argument presented. In this case you don't even attempt to do that, because there is no strawman, you were very clear that people have an obligation to assume everyone is innocent until proven guilty (in their thoughts and opinions, at all times).
Since you're not willing to address the claim you made in the context of my example which clearly demonstrates that your claim was nonsensical, there's no point in continuing this conversation beyond this.
Obligatory Reddit-type response: "Sir, this is a Wendy's drive-thru. Not a court of law."
HN response: Of course, everyone is free to say what they wish. First amendment. Freedom of speech. Freedom of thought. Freedom is the basic human right.
Wikipedia says, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 11, states: "Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defense."
Notice that this covers the rights of someone "who has been charged with an offence" in "a public trial".
There's not actually a "human right" preventing people from having or expressing opinions.
Precious little about your comment makes sense from that first sentence to the rest of it.
> Of course, everyone is free to say what they wish. First amendment. Freedom of speech. Freedom of thought. Freedom is the basic human right.
I'm not even going to bother falling into the tangential tarpit of acting like someone is a bomb maker without them having gone to trial is a "1st amendment right". After all, if your best defense of a statement is "I'm legally allowed to say it", it's probably not worth much consideration.
> Notice that this covers the rights of someone "who has been charged with an offence" in "a public trial".
No it doesn't. It covers the rights of a person. Period. That's literally the point of a universal declaration of human rights
You're trying to play word sashimi to make a point that isn't made. The definition of guilt is specific to a public trial exactly because a "trial" of public opinions is so easy to manipulate.
Sure it can't force the general public to be decent people and understand that people should be presumed innocent until proven guilty... but it's also not endorsing the public not do so. It's not limiting presumption of innocence to trials.
I think it's reasonable for police & even FBI to investigate after a fire in a home with lots of chemicals, including 40lbs of potassium nitrate, after also finding bomb-making information. However it does seem like they made a rush to judgment in arresting him rather than simply letting the hospital hold him until medically cleared, after which the police could hold him for 48 hours without charging, all while they investigate things more thoroughly like any writing/internet posts etc that could indicate any actual intent to use the stuff, rather than simply a (very dangerous) lack of care in how he conducts his hobbies.
Yikes, what you describe could easily be a decent portion of HN people’s homes. Don’t forget the anti-social, unpopular with the neighbors bit either. And of course the NYPost appears to thrive on drumming up scandal.
I second that. The ammount of microcontrollers, arduino/RPI boards, gsm modules, 400 Mhz radio transcievers and such would most likely "make me available" for "interviews".
Just a few years back when moved to a diff city for the job we had a visit to check if "we're ok" because our electricity bill was way above the average for the area. The silver lining: My wife was ok with me upgrading everything in the rack with new, low(er) power equipment.
Also, never forget how these intitial police investigations are wrong all the time. How do they know this is potassium nitrate? Was it labeled? Does it look like it? Smell like it? Taste like it?
Do you have any ammonium nitrate though? I mean, chances are he was just some pyro and not actually interested in bombing/killing people. But it's dumb to do that in a flat.
>Cops said FDNY fire marshals are combing through Squire’s charred, first-floor apartment to determine the cause of the blaze, an FDNY spokesperson said.
The fact that his apartment is 'charred' suggests he was doing stuff in it.
Could be he took the materials with him as he was trying to escape out the back window, or that's just where he was storing them so they wouldn't be found if a search was conducted.
I think it's useful that this was reported on, because it could make people more wary of shelling out money to a guy who was recklessly endangering others even if there were no nefarious motives.
> The fact that his apartment is 'charred' suggests he was doing stuff in it.
Or, it suggests that there was a fire, which is not really up for debate.
> Could be he took the materials with him as he was trying to escape out the back window
You are making up a hypothesis to make someone sound guilty with no evidence.
> I think it's useful that this was reported on, because it could make people more wary of shelling out money to a guy who was recklessly endangering others even if there were no nefarious motives.
This is a poor opinion. First, he has not been found guilty of "reckless endangement", and you are just assuming he's guilty. Do you also expect to see reporting every time someone recklessly endangers others by driving at high speeds through a school zone, or accidently runs through a stop sign?
Publishing accusations of someone (especially a very easily google-able person) being a terrorist is not something that should be done lightly without proof.
Hell, right now I'm pretty sure I have both bleach and ammonia in my apartment as regular cleaning supplies. When combined, these ingredients are dangerous, but that sure as shit doesn't mean I'm endangering others just by possessing them.
I have a garden of about 400 m2. So yes, there are different 20kg bags of fertilizer in the shed. Ammonium nitrate being NPK 34-0-0 (wiki), I think I can get pretty close to that with boosting fertilizer (like 25-5-5 or something). The point is that one could write a hit piece with only "true" information about me. I even have both "rightwing" and "leftwing" extremist propaganda in my house! (Say, Nozick and Solzjenitsyn. Or Nietzsche and Orwell.)
There is no reason to implicitly trust what a police officer tells a reporter or says at a press conference during the initial investigation of a crime.
Fair enough, but would you take all of the most suspicious-looking items in your house that could possibly implicate you in a crime and put them all into one crate, including printed material and books that explain how to perform said crime?
