Wowsa, I know I’ve made comments like the one the US Marshal service investigated, along the lines of “I wouldn’t be surprised if ${victims of some injustice} didn’t start seeking vigilante justice”. Cory Doctorow wrote a whole novella (“Radicalized”) about the premise. It doesn’t mean I want someone to, because I’ve been to law-free places and hell if I wanna live in a Might Makes Right society. It means that I’ve read about the French Revolution and would prefer we identify when we might be going down that road so we can avoid it.
It means the thought crossed your mind with enough strength for you to post it. In almost all cases that's a big nothing, but it's a tiny breadcrumb that might start to look like something if there are a lot of them, or if you were to rant on about it in a thread. Its interesting to think about automating searches for actual threats or patterns that might be indicators.
Not necessarily. It means at least that in the mental model they have of other people they think those other people might do something. Importantly, that mental model does not need to be correct or accurately model any real person or group for that to be expressed.
For an example (a silly one so people don't make a useless tangent arguing irrelevant details), if I for some reason believed that all Chevrolet drivers were fanatics and psychotics, and after someone made a disparaging comment about Chevrolet vehicles, I might say "I wouldn't be surprised if Chevy drivers assaulted someone over this". This doesn't mean I think that should happen, as it's an expression of what I think other people might do. It also doesn't actually express that other people might do this, because my mental model of those people is obviously incorrect. The only thing you can actually infer from that statement is what I think about that subgroup of people, whether I'm one of them or not, and that's just opinion.
My guess is that this comment was flagged by an automated system and only once someone reviewed it did they say "nah, this is nothing."
> it means the thought crossed your mind...might start to look like something if there are a lot of them
This doesn't make any sense. Thinking about worst case scenarios is normal. The person who is going to rob you is the one person who is definitely not going to tell you in advance that you're going to be robbed.
It's one of those scale-dependent things. As a rule, history's greatest atrocities didn't originate in secret. From the Communist Manifesto to Mein Kampf to the PNAC charter, the architects were not shy about telling anyone who would listen exactly what they thought should happen or what they planned to do. It's fair to place the Christchurch shooter in that category.
At the other end of the spectrum, it seems that people who go online and rant about how someone should shoot the President or cut a judge's brake lines or whatever are the least likely to follow through. They aren't exactly the movers and shakers of civilization, more likely just thoughtless kids or random loudmouths. Wasting law enforcement time on nonspecific threats is the sort of thing a government that has too much power tends to do.
Wasn't the Christchurch shooter known for ranting online in advance of his murders?
Did he not say exactly what he was going to do, then do it?
I don't see what scale has to do with it.
I also don't see how an absolute statement like "The person who is going to rob you is the one person who is definitely not going to tell you in advance that you're going to be robbed." can be believed. It only takes one counter example.
This is a thread about anticipating crimes based on online commentary, something that could absolutely have flagged the Christchurch massacre.
Well he did both as far as I know. He had a history of posting racist messages including threats of violence. Ultimately he posted a manifesto and then took action on his words. The video itself was a warning because it started before the shooting. A timely enough warning based on that alone could have prevented this tragedy.
> He had a history of posting racist messages including threats of violence. Ultimately he posted a manifesto and then took action on his words. The video itself was a warning because it started before the shooting.
Seems you know this background and motivation well. Since it perfectly fits the definition of terrorism, why won't you call him a terrorist? Is it because he isn't brown?
"To be clear, we have no legal department, let alone a subpoena compliance section of it. However, what we thankfully have is a very helpful Ken "Popehat" White on speed dial"
Beautiful. For anyone not familiar with Mr White, his blog is worth a read. I can't imagine someone I'd rather not face off against as a gov't official making spurious demands.
"This website's agitating negative feelings towards the Federal judiciary! Let's tie them up for three months. It'll fester in their staff's minds. Maybe they'll see it's easier to say nothing in future..."
It's intimidation. I hope they push back harder than just writing about the incident. The initial investigation was entirely meritless.
Any time two people are secretly obnoxious on purpose it's a conspiracy. So sure, it might be that. I hope you're not invoking the word 'conspiracy' to make such a mundane thing sound ridiculous.
Unless the facts in the article are fabricated, we can say for sure that members of the US Marshal service conspired to interfere with tech dirt’s business. Conspiracies happen all the time. It’s not a synonym for “something that isn’t real”.
No, we cannot say that with any certainty. The most probable explanation is they had to investigate a threat and did not want evidence to be destroyed in the meantime. There is no reason to believe there was an intent to interfere with a business and it sounds like there would have been no interference with the business if they maintained logs for 90 days.
Then they conspired to investigate tech dirt, or one of its users, it’s still a conspiracy. The US Marshals (secretly) acted in harmony toward a common end.
The article describes what is factually a conspiracy. That’s what the word conspiracy means, it’s just become a word people use to try and undermine people or their arguments without providing any substantive criticism for them. As the commenter does above.
If you are insisting that a conspiracy is a secretive action towards a common end, then the US Marshals and TechDirt are the colluding parties based upon the information provided. The person who made the post is the stated target. That being said, the definition of conspiracy involves illegal or immoral actions. There is no evidence of the former in the article. The latter is largely an individual judgement call, yet there is no evidence that data exchanged hands (simply that it was preserved for a longer duration than it normally would have) so I trouble seeing it as immoral.
Calling or implying that the US Marshals' actions with respect to TechDirt a conspiracy is a large part of the reason why people dismiss conspiracies as fictional.
It’s usually used to describe something secretive, or illegal, or wrongful on some level (and anything can be considered wrongful or harmful depending on your perspective), but that’s certainly not a required condition by definition.
Just about everything the government does is by definition part of a conspiracy. Everything the government does in secret is most certainly part of a conspiracy.
The word has just be morphed into having a seperate implied meaning, where people simply describe something as a “conspiracy” or “conspiracy theory” as a way of dismissing a claim or criticism without actually engaging with it on any level. This article describes a conspiracy fact, and as far as I can tell, none of the facts reported in the article are in dispute.
One of the parent commenters postulates a motive, a claim which is dismissed by suggesting that would be a conspiracy. That response lacks any level of substance whatsoever, because it is factually a conspiracy no matter what the motive.
It's almost like the Marshals saw the comment, knew it was likely NOT a real threat; but sent a "Hey, hold on to that guy's info for a bit, just in case" letter.
I am thinking if something HAD happened to that particular judge within 90 days of the comment being posted, they would be VERY interested in having a conversation with the commentor
They have one very good thing to complain about: the comment very clearly violated no laws. TechDirt had the burden of preserving records and a gag on their speech placed upon them for absolutely no reason.
"Hell, eventually somebody might decide that it’s cheaper to pay a hitman to just cut a brake line or something than go through discovery in that judge’s court."
It was in reply to a story about the founder of Silk Road being arrested for, among other things, hiring a hitman. In the Ulbrecht case, the hitman was a FED and was paid by Ulbrecht after giving staged photographic evidence of a murder.
It looks like they were investigating whether this person was doing anything in furtherance of such a plot beyond just angry comments and wanted them to keep quiet while they investigated.
That's a pretty standard burden for any org that hosts third-party speech to expect to have occasionally. I've worked at two places that had a legal hold SOP.
do you think, if i created a dragnet of internet comments threatening violence might happen in multiple forums across the internet, to varying degrees to silly to seriously contemplative?
you think, perchance, they were actually looking at multiple comments from multiple sources presenting a pattern of behaviour by some pseudononymous potential plotter?
people are so self centered and ignorant of these things,.
"...but its also not unreasonable to interpret it that way."
In the absence of other evidence, I would say that it is unreasonable to interpret it as a threat. I mean, what's next, arresting people for murdering a video game character on the assumption they would do that in real life?
I'm fairly concerned about stochastic terrorism, but I'd disagree about that comment. Reading it in context, I'd say the author has some inaccurate views about how often people will turn to murder rather than pay court fees, but... it's not the same thing as saying "someone should do X."
I think I get what you're getting at, but I see a pretty big difference between a random internet comment and a person of actual power saying "Ayyy, it sure would make me happy if so and so just, ya know, got taken care of"
When the identities of random internet commenters are difficult to establish, and may themselves represent larger interests or entities, there's some concern with that viewpoint.
Some people I'm neutral toward find that priest, who I am also neutral toward, quite turbulent. I wonder if any of them would go so far as taking drastic action against him.
also, its more likely the us marshals were trying to connect the dots on more straightforward threats and this comment ended up in the drag net.
so if you think internet threats are a big deal, then the effort going into documenting those potentiak threats are still important and juzt becausw they observed a false-positive dowsnt mean the us marshalls went overboard.
the end basically just confirms there was nothin in that specific comment.
maybe if they dug deeper, like a journalist would, they would illuminate what the actual broader activities were.
You think as part of some larger dragnet it just happened the US Marshals called them the next day?
If it's a a dragnet, they aren't calling about every single post in under 24 hours of it occurring unless the investigating team is absolutely gargantuan.
Your explanation really doesn't make sense because it's the wrong one.
Unless you have tens or hundreds of thousands for a multiyear lawsuit, you're screwed. I recently had a trooper violate my wife's civil rights. I had a lawyer tell me it was a violation, but it wasnt worth standing up for ourselves because the judges don't care about cases unless there was extensive monetary loss.
Also no lawyer wants 30% of virtually zero actual damages. If you aren’t willing to just spend ludicrous amounts of your own money that you’ll never recover, you better have a case with substantial statutory damages or an excellent shot at a jury awarding punitive damages.
Federal civil rights cases are supposed to cover legal expenses, but the judge has to decide if they think the case was important enough to warrant it. So we might not be awarded the legal expenses.
This brings up a really big point though. If the lawyers don't want it because they can't make money, and the judges don't want it because it's not important enough, then who stands up for our rights? Do we even really have them if they can be ignored?
At risk of attracting the attention of the US Marshals (whom I previously held in high regard): These kinds of stupid games will end in all political discussions happening over TOR with all the implications that entails.
I don't think they are stupid games. It's a policy they are forced to enforce. Good intentions turned into law often turn into bizarre actions from government departmens..
Thing is, can that gag order be imposed without a judge in the mix?
It seems reasonable to require lawful gag orders to be confirmed by the judicuary, not just issued at will by the executive.
So, there's another similar case mentioned here, but related to a Reason comment: with that one the government went and got a gag order from a judge.
In this case, they just sent that "preservation letter" and in the letter said not to alert the user: Techdirt (somewhat reasonably) is portraying that as "effectively" a gag order. They didn't go on even to issue a subpoena here, and so they also didn't go get an actual gag order, but it's something they've been known to do.
IANAL but if the executive (e.g. police) can charge someone with obstruction of justice, i'd imagine they could reasonably issue an unofficial gag order irrespective so long as there is something under investigation..
I don't know the operative law, regulation, or procedure here. Though gag orders are certainly imposed with some regularity in investigations and legal proceedings.
> where an administrative subpoena authorized by a Federal or State statute or a Federal or State grand jury subpoena is obtained, delay the notification required under section 2703(b) of this title for a period not to exceed ninety days upon the execution of a written certification of a supervisory official that there is reason to believe that notification of the existence of the subpoena may have an adverse result described in paragraph (2) of this subsection.
This would seem to sync up with what the story said:
> With help from Ken, we soon received a "preservation letter" demanding that we preserve for a period of 90 days "any and all records and other evidence, [...] In addition, the letter effectively gagged us, saying that we were not to disclose the existence of the letter "in any manner that could alert the user" of the account.
Not sure if you read the same comment I did, but there was nobody 'wishing for injury or harm' here - it was an observation that someone might choose that path.
If a mob boss you owed gambling debts to tells you “Nice house, it would be a shame if something happened to it.” he can’t use the defence that it couldn’t possibly be interpreted as a threat because the precise syntactic reading of that statement is that it’s merely an observation.
When standards applied to TechDirt also apply to Twitter, then the world will be in upheaval. Until then, it's just a way to dox malcontents unsatisfied with the regime.
An excellent example of overzealous prosecution over internet blog/article comments is the Reason magazine 'woodchipper' debacle. This WSJ article is a good place to begin reading, although Popehat did a lot of great work, and Reason covered the story a little bit after the gag orders and subpoenas had died down.
Discussions of merits of the investigation, burden of information retention and gag, and the threat-level imposed by the comment in the first place, what's highly evident to me is that gag + retention + investigation result in a much larger audience for an incidental comment then if no such orders had been placed.
In my home country you have the constitutional right to visit a judge at their home to plead particular kinds of cases.
All the same, threatening the judiciary is one of the most anti-social things you can do, and should be strictly policed. I don't know if trawling news comments is an effective way to do that, but I'm glad to know they're making an effort. A few false positives (appropriately handled) is a good sign of sufficiently high sensitivity.
It's great that we have these laws and the U.S Marshalls to enforce them since a lot of jerks wind up in civil litigation because civil litigation is how one can deal non-violently with jerks who try and screw with people's businesses, and cause damage and harm. These jerks are used to getting what they want through intimidation and well... being jerks. Without this kind of protection, there'd be nothing to stop these jerks from getting their way through continuing their pattern of intimidation.
In my home country (that I share with the US Marshalls) you have the constitutional right to express a desire for harm to come upon anyone or anything, regardless of whether it's a federal judge or not. It's worrying that a federal agency would do anything in regards to comments that are clearly protected by the constitution.
It's quite the other way around: threats must be very specific in order to not be protected speech in the United States. Saying 'let's burn this mother down' during a protest is protected speech, for instance. In general, the threat must be specific and imminent, such as 'let's go to that building right there and do $violence right now!'
They have been mentioned several times in this thread, but you should consult Popehat's writings for in depth breakdowns of what is and is not protected speech.
Pointing at a person during riots and screaming "Kill that muthafucka now" would almost certainly cross the threshold.
Organizing an unofficial Wannsee conference to plan a genocide of $UNDESIRED_GROUP into details would not, even though the entire event would be a hatefest.
Regardless of personal political leanings everybody should be concerned about the increasingly authoritarian actions of our government. What’s equally concerning is there is no shortage of people that will come out and defend this stuff, as long as it is being wielded against the proper target. Or in defense of a favorable entity.
The nation was founded on the principle "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants". The question is whether an increase in political violence reflects negatively on the citizenry or negatively on the ruling class; political violence isn't necessarily immoral if the ruling class is sufficiently corrupt/authoritarian.
>The nation was founded on the principle "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants".
No, it wasn't. That is a quote by Thomas Jefferson in a letter he wrote about Shay's Rebellion - one man's opinion, not a foundational legal or moral principle, and not every founding father agreed with him. While Jefferson was sympathetic to the spirit of revolution that brought Shay's Rebellion about, he also condemned it as having been the result of ignorance. As is often the case with pithy quotes from the founding fathers, the speaker and their opinions are a lot more nuanced than the quote, stripped of all necessary context, is meant to imply[0].
As to whether an increase in political violence reflects negatively on the citizenry or negatively on the ruling class, Jefferson (a member of the ruling class, mind you) would likely have seen it reflecting negatively on the citizenry, as reading the letter in which the "tree of liberty" quote appears[1], it's clear that Jefferson draws a distinction between the necessity for the potential of rebellion and the commission of political violence itself. In fact, just before the quote you provided, Jefferson says the answer to such rebellions is to "set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them," not to support them on principle.
Preserving 90 days worth of data could cost a lot of money in hard drives, backups, technical changes etc. Techdirt might have these resources, but a small blog might not. Hell, eventually somebody might decide that it’s cheaper to pay a hitman to just cut a brake line or something than go through the data preservation process for the US marshals.
I would like to see first amendment protections that limit what judges and courts can do. Since this doesn’t require Congress to “make no law”, while failing to limit the reach of the government.
As a side note, I would also like to see greater protections for “commercial speech”.
Why don't we address the incompetence and and misconduct rife in the judicial branch? That will cut down on the threats.
One major issue is that everything is considered so secret that you can't subpoena past complaints even if they contain exculpatory evidence. That's right, they will protect the image of the judiciary even if it means letting an innocent person be found guilty. They reason that secrecy is the best way to preserve public trust in the judicial system. As anyone knows, that's just BS - transparency, or at least allowing subpoenas, would be the best way to ensure the proper actions are being taken.
You can probably tell, but I've had some bad experiences with a magistrate and judge recently. Magistrates in my state aren't even required to be lawyers nor pass the bar...
