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Homeland Security Wants To Subpoena Techdirt Over The Identity Of A Hyperbolic Commenter (boingboing.net)
Techdirt is in hot water with the Department of Homeland Security all thanks to a commenter known as Digger. Techdirt's Tim Cushing published a story about the Hancock County, IN Sheriff's Department officers who stole $240,000 under color of asset forfeiture. In response to the story, Digger wrote, "The only 'bonus' these criminals [the Sheriff's Department officers] are likely to see could be a bullet to their apparently empty skulls." The Department of Homeland Security then contacted Techdirt to ask whom they should send a subpoena to in order to identify Digger. Masnick is worried the subpoena could come with a gag order. "Normally, we'd wait for the details before publishing, but given a very similar situation involving commenters on the site Reason last year, which included a highly questionable and almost certainly unconstitutional gag order preventing Reason from speaking about it, we figured it would be worth posting about it before we've received any such thing," Masnick writes.
The only 'bonus' these criminals [the Sheriff's Department officers] are likely to see could be a bullet to their apparently empty skulls.
So it looks like "homeland security" should be renamed STASI/NKVD/etc. They appear to be going after people for wrong-think, just like other state security apparatus of yesteryear in various communist countries.
Om, nomnomnom...
Steal my money under asset bullshit and I may very well put a bullet in your head.
What can they do? Through you in jail and civil forfeiture all your stuff. Thanks for playing. You don't think you've broken any laws today? You are probably breaking one right now and you don't know it. If they want to arrest you, they will.
Come on man, you know this.
From day one I have feared and loathed the use of the name Father^h^h^h^h^h^h Homeland Security. I did and continue to say; What the absolute fuck? Does no one else see the irony. And then they started acting the part.
Who is Masnick? Oh right, its the editor of Techdirt. Ok now the article makes some sense. Of course, simply writing "Mike Masnick, the editor of Techdirt, is worried the..." is probably too complicated, and I guess it should be common knowledge who 'Masnick' is, or we should expect people to look it up right?
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
You guys are all funny and stuff... but let's take a moment away from the snark about a donut-head reality-TV dip-weasle who isn't in charge of anything and recall that this is a story about our actual government running around stomping on your liberties and the constitution right now. Not in some Trump-ruled dystopian future, but in the Patriot Act present. So if we want to spew some snark toward the top of the executive branch, let's look to the guy who is actually in charge.
Very few people in government seem to have any interest in protecting your right to privacy online, or your freedom of speech. Getting deflected into a Team Red vs. Team Blue side-show does nothing to help rein in our leadership. It only provides a distraction while they continue to chisel away at your freedom.
Some of you jokesters are old enough to be able to recognize just how dystopian the present is. You don't even have to go all the way back to black-and-white TV to find an era when "show me your papers" was a popular meme for showing a horrible totalitarian regime. The idea of a government that is always watching its citizens was the cardboard-cutout villain in every action movie and TV show.
And here we are, less than half a lifetime later with a national government that will send agents to initiate a secret investigation about some loudmouth troll on the internet - threatening anyone who even mentions the fact that the government is snooping around with jail time. Holy crap, have we lost our way.
You guys are smart enough and well-informed enough that you should be leading the cries of "to the woodchippers!" instead of laying it off on some doofus who is not only not in power, but is never going to get elected to anything.
> Some of you jokesters are old enough to be able to recognize just how dystopian the present is
Some of us are old enough to recognize how much better it's gotten. I'm not quite old enough to remember the McCarthy era, but I do remember the hippie movement and the anti-war protests of the 1960's, and abuses of federal and police power during that era. Technology has made broad searching easier, but it's also made publicly reporting the abuses easier.
The war on drugs asset forfeiture cases are a source of funding for police departments, both honest and corrupt departments. They're a very real problem for honest citizens. But the ability to get information and find out the relevant laws, to fight it in court, has improved tremendously during my adult lifetime.
Banditry is normally punishable by death. Civil asset forfeiture is banditry.
The original Techdirt comment:
The only "bonus" these criminals are likely to see could be a bullet to their apparently empty skulls.
The person wronged probably knows people who know people in low places who'd take on the challenge pro-bono, after a proper "cooling-off" period.
WTF? Digger is simply speculating that the victim of the forfeiture proceeding might be pissed off enough to go after the terminal kind of revenge. That seems like a reasonable speculation to me, and does not constitute a threat.
However, perhaps more to the point is the comment Digger posted immediately prior to the one quoted in TFS:
Everyone on the government side of this should have grand theft and / or larceny charges filed against them, and double the jail time as it is a slam dunk case.
They did not follow proper procedures, they no longer have the protection or immunity to prosecution normally afforded to government agents.
By failing to follow procedure, they've shown their true colors and should be treated as the criminals that they are.
I suspect the DHS, and whichever other TLAs and LEOs stepped on their own dicks in this case, are more upset about the comment Digger posted first, and are only using the one he posted next as a flimsy excuse to go hunting. Frankly, if they really believe Digger poses or is connected to a threat, then they might as well be the Keystone Cops. And if they DON'T believe in the threat, then they're bullies and thugs. Either way, they all need to be dismissed and barred from any further government jobs.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Yeah, hyperbole saying he'll burn in hell or something is one thing, but threats of violence are not automatically hyberbole. Simply [secretly] not planning to do it, and just saying you will, is not an attempt to communicate exaggeration.
Hyperbole is an exaggerated comment not meant to be taken literally. If you straight out say something threatening, without any clear exaggeration, then it isn't obviously hyperbole. I'm not sure what the source of the "hyperbole" claim even is. Techdirt, I guess? The comment may or may not have been a poorly executed attempt at hyperbole; or it might have been a threat. My advice, if you're making comments that involve the police, and violence, make a clear exaggeration. Don't just deadpan a threat and rely on people trusting that you're a good person and so it just must have been exaggeration.
Threatening to send Voldemort or a Klingon Bird of Prey to wipe them out, that is clear hyperbole. A "bullet to their... skull" is just not obviously hyperbole, especially in the context where firearms are commonly possessed, and in fact a constitutional right. If somebody said that about me, I'd have to start carrying inflatable ninjas in my pocket for protection.
And if you run a website that has comments, expect to get some subpoenas, especially if you don't delete, redact, or otherwise squelch comments describing violence in the context of real humans.