[Air-L] Jail for Facebook spoof Moroccan

Muhammad Abdul-Mageed mumageed at yahoo.com
Sun Feb 24 06:10:13 PST 2008


I think they do understand the variables of the situation, and if not, they could have asked some specialists. I believe the case is that they wanted to punish him so that others do not do the same--"[t]he prosecution had urged the court to impose a sentence which set an example for others", the BBC reports says. I do not think whether we should view Fouad act as anything like identity theft, in the figurative sense, or not, though. In all cases, I believe he should not be jailed for it: he did it for fun, and CMC is in some cases that playful!

--Muhammad

Conor Schaefer <conor.schaefer at gmail.com> wrote: I don't at all speak French, but couldn't the quote you use to
demonstrate the authorities' ignorance be simply a nomenclature issue?
In English all the time I find people mixing up "site" and "page." I
don't think this indicates such extreme ignorance that the authorities
are incapable of assessing Fouad's actions.

More likely to me is that they understood roughly what he did, and are
just motivated by politics which most of us on this list might be driven
to call a bit extreme.

Julian Hopkins wrote:
> This might interest some people. 
>
> Jail for Facebook spoof Moroccan 
>
> A Moroccan computer engineer has been sentenced to three years in jail for
> setting up a Facebook profile in the name of a member of the royal family...
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7258950.stm
>
>
> There's also a website set up with a petition and more information about the
> case: http://www.helpfouad.com/ 
>
> There are some mitigating factors stated, one of which is interesting: 
> "La police marocaine ne comprend absolument rien à Internet. Il est demandé
> à Fouad dans un des paragraphes pour quelle raison avait-il créé le site
> Facebook ?"
> (Translation: "The Moroccan police understands absolutely nothing about the
> internet. It is asked of Fouad in one of the paragraphs [of the charge
> sheet] for what reason had he created the Facebook site?")
>
> Cheers,
>
> Julian
>
>
>
> ++++++++++
> Blog: www.julianhopkins.net
> Skype: julhop
> IM: jfprhopkins at hotmail.com
>
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--
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed,
PhD Student
Dept. of Linguistics,
Indiana University, Bloomington,
USA
www.mumageed.blogspot.com

       
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