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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...
And Mexico is going to pay for them!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Steal my money under asset bullshit and I may very well put a bullet in your head.
If you offer anonymous comments? Tell them the IP address is 127.0.0.1 and that's all you know.
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.