{"id":91285,"date":"2013-11-14T18:04:40","date_gmt":"2013-11-14T17:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/ryan-shapiro-the-punk-rocker-who-can-liberate-your-fbi-file\/"},"modified":"2013-11-14T18:04:40","modified_gmt":"2013-11-14T17:04:40","slug":"ryan-shapiro-the-punk-rocker-who-can-liberate-your-fbi-file","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/ryan-shapiro-the-punk-rocker-who-can-liberate-your-fbi-file\/","title":{"rendered":"Ryan Shapiro: The Punk Rocker Who Can Liberate Your FBI File"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Will Shapiro profiles Ryan Shapiro for <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2013\/11\/foia-ryan-shapiro-fbi-files-lawsuit\">Mother Jones<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Ryan Shapiro has just wrapped up a talk at Boston&#8217;s Suffolk University Law School, and as usual he&#8217;s surrounded by a gaggle of admirers. The crowd\u00ad, consisting of law students, academics, and activist types, is here for a panel discussion on the <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.law.cornell.edu\/uscode\/text\/18\/43\">Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act<\/a>, a 2006 law targeting activists whose protest actions lead to a &ldquo;loss of profits&rdquo; for industry. Shapiro, <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/_rshapiro\">a 37-year-old Ph.D. student<\/a> at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, contributed a slideshow of newspaper headlines, posters, and government documents from as far back as the 1800s depicting animal advocates as a threat to national security. Now audience members want to know more about his dissertation and the archives he&#8217;s using. But many have a personal request: Would Shapiro help them discover what&#8217;s in their FBI files?<\/p>\n<h6>The clip below shows Shapiro at an animal-rights conference, using some of the documents he obtained to make fun of the FBI&#8217;s investigative methods.<\/h6>\n<p><iframe src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/u6QbLK5aySU\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>He is happy to oblige. According to the Justice Department, this tattooed activist-turned-academic is the FBI&#8217;s &ldquo;most prolific&rdquo; Freedom of Information Act requester&mdash;filing, during one period in 2011, upward of two documents requests a day. In the course of his doctoral work, which examines how the FBI monitors and investigates protesters, Shapiro has developed a novel, legal, and highly effective approach to mining the agency&#8217;s records. Which is why the government is petitioning the United States District Court in Washington, DC, to prevent the release of 350,000 pages of documents he&#8217;s after.<\/p>\n<p>Invoking a legal strategy that had its heyday during the Bush administration, the FBI claims that Shapiro&#8217;s multitudinous requests, taken together, constitute a &ldquo;mosaic&rdquo; of information whose release could &ldquo;significantly and irreparably damage national security&rdquo; and would have &ldquo;significant deleterious effects&rdquo; on the bureau&#8217;s &ldquo;ongoing efforts to investigate and combat domestic terrorism.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>So-called mosaic theory has been used in the past to stop the release of specific documents, but it has never been applied so broadly. &ldquo;It&#8217;s designed to be retrospective,&rdquo; explains Kel McClanahan, a DC-based lawyer who specializes in national security and FOIA law. &ldquo;You can&#8217;t say, &lsquo;What information, if combined with future information, could paint a mosaic?&#8217; because that would include all information!&rdquo;&hellip;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>[continues at <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2013\/11\/foia-ryan-shapiro-fbi-files-lawsuit\">Mother Jones<\/a>]<\/p>\n<p>The post <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/disinfo.com\/2013\/11\/ryan-shapiro-punk-rocker-can-liberate-fbi-file\/\">Ryan Shapiro: The Punk Rocker Who Can Liberate Your FBI File<\/a> appeared first on <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/disinfo.com\/\">disinformation<\/a>.<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/disinfo\/oMPh\/~3\/nEKD6mZAwKU\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Ryan Shapiro: The Punk Rocker Who Can Liberate Your FBI File\">Disinfo<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Will Shapiro profiles Ryan Shapiro for Mother Jones: Ryan Shapiro has just wrapped up a talk at Boston&#8217;s Suffolk University Law School, and as usual he&#8217;s surrounded by a gaggle of admirers. The crowd\u00ad, consisting of law students, academics, and activist types, is here for a panel discussion on the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1213,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-91285","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}