Talk:Najibullah Zazi

some things the article might want to reflect

some things the article might want to reflect:

1. The FBI handwriting expert has not made a final determination and needs to see original documents.

2. The criminal complaint does not mention terrorist training camps, only the DOJ press release does, and presumably the FBI agents' affidavits, which have not been been made public, AFAIK.

3. The authorities say that the bombmaking notes were found on Zazi's computer, but the criminal complaint places them as attachments on emails in what are presumably webmail accounts, which would mean they were on the webmail service's servers, not Zazi's computer, or possibly in both places.

4. The criminal complaint says that the bombmaking notes were sent to three email accounts controlled by Zazi, from a fourth unidentified account.

Softshells (talk) 23:28, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

These are all good points.

I have wondered what language these handwritten notes were written in. If they were written in a language Zazi was not literate in, that would be a pretty good sign he didn't write them. Who makes handwritten notes, and then keeps an image file of them, rather than transcribing them into machine readable form, anyhow?

This is pure speculation on my part, but one reason to keep images of a note rather than typing them in could be to prevent a text search of the computer's files from turning up the images. I'm more interested in the part where they are email attachments though. One could send anyone an email with an image attachment of how to make a bomb (or any other illegal activity of your choice), and most people would then have their email program (outlook, thunderbird, etc) download it, and it's suddenly on your hard drive. -- — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.72.140.63 (talk • contribs) 10:43, 2009 September 26

Attachments? So they might have been attached to junk-mail he never even read? In March 2002 Pakistani security officials lead their US colleagues on a series of raids of "suspected safe houses", in Faisalabad. One of the houses they raided was described as suspicious, because it was full of foreigners. The captives had what seemed like a pretty good explanation for that. They were University students, and the house was the University's dormitory for foreign students. In their later annual reviews some of these men had junk mail they received used as a justification for their continued detention. Geo Swan (talk) 11:02, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

explanation

Years ago I used to put the full birthdate in articles, when it had been published.

Subsequently the wikipedia adopted a policy on biographies of living persons. Out of concerns to protect private individuals from identity threat we now don't normally give the full month and day of birth, when just the year of birth is sufficient.

It shouldn't matter whether an individual is strongly suspected of plotting terrorism, or even if they convicted. We should extend the same protection against identity theft to them as we would to any other individual.

I have re-inserted the {{Birth year and age}} template twice. I strongly suspect that whoever is removing it doesn't recognize the template, doesn't understand why it is used, and thinks their removal of it is an improvement. But they are mistaken. The template emits html into the web page, that can read by robots. Allowing robots to reliably know a birth year, rather than relying on unreliable screen-scraping, is a very valuable thing. Please don't remove the template unless you understand how it works. Geo Swan (talk) 05:31, 30 September 2009 (UTC)