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from the unintended-consequences-anyone? dept.
On Dark Web sites like the Silk Road black market and its discussion forums, anonymous visitors could write even the most extreme libertarian and anarchist statements without fear. The rest of the internet, as a few critics of the US judicial system may soon learn, isn't quite so free of consequences.
Last week the Department of Justice issued a grand jury subpoena to the libertarian media site Reason.com, demanding that it identify six visitors to the site. The subpoena letter, obtained and published by blogger Ken White, lists trollish comments made by those six Reason readers that—whether seriously or in jest—call for violence against Katherine Forrest, the New York judge who presided over the Silk Road trial and late last month sentenced Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht to life in prison.
"It's judges like these that should be taken out back and shot," wrote one user named Agammamon, in a comment thread that has since been deleted from Reason.com's story on Ulbricht's sentencing.
"It's judges like these that will be taken out back and shot," answered another user named Alan.
"Why do it out back? Shoot them out front, on the steps of the courthouse," reads a third comment from someone going by the name Cloudbuster.
The subpoena calls for Reason.com to hand over data about the six users, including their IP addresses, account information, phone numbers, email addresses, billing information, and devices associated with them. And it cites a section of the United States criminal code that forbids "mailing threatening communications." When those communications threaten a federal judge, they constitute a felony punishable by as much as 10 years in prison. (The average internet user has no such protection.)
The Streisand Effect lives.
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @09:46AM
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I agree with Pumpernickel: those who advocate prosecuting for speech, even direct threats, even when based on inferred intent, are advocating for prosecution of thoughtcrime. Prosecuting fools who yell "fire" in a crowded theatre is not a limitation on speech, and it requires no serious consideration of intent. If the theatre is actually on fire, give the guy a medal. If it is not on fire and a panic results, prosecute. Here the only reason to consider intent is to give a break to someone who clearly did NOT mean to cause a panic. An apt parallel would be with someone who ran you over with a car on purpose versus not on purpose. If we like the presumption of innocence, then we would only want to prosecute those who were successful, while giving a break to those who did so on accident. Freedom of speech is simply the freedom to say whatever the fuck you want, and intent has nothing to do with it.
Speech in a theatre is a curious thing, since it travels over the air and into other people's ears, and before they can parse the information, their brains sometimes make them do stupid things. This is at the heart of why your example seems to limit the freedom of speech, but really doesn't. In this context the action of yelling "fire" may directly cause harm before it is perceived as speech. In the same sense a police siren is not speech, and neither is pointing a finger, even though they may have a well interpreted meaning in some people's brains and directly cause reflexive actions. Speech is something made up of words and grammar, and it has a literal objective meaning we can make up with the help of a dictionary, or it's not speech at all. In that sense, "fire" is barely speech to begin with.
You observe correctly that the freedom of speech must permit to say "there is a fire in here" in a way that allows listeners to parse before acting (say, in a quite calm tone, or over the net). By the same token, anyone should be allowed to write whatever the fuck they want on the net, since there we don't have the real-time aural pathway directly into people's brains, and if some people are going to react in a reflexive, unthinking way to what they read on the screen, it's them who should be prosecuted for their actions, or at least examined by medical professionals.
I would be interesting to see a coordinated effort to flood the net with very credible looking, but ultimately fake threats. It certainly would not hurt anyone, although it would offend the hell out of some people. Here's a fun idea: one could make a pseudonymous threat directed at a large list of people. If by pure chance one of those people has an actual accident shortly thereafter, then it may be perceived as a murder, and the pseudonymous party will acquire the (undeserved) reputation, allowing it to issue more credible threats, hoping to get lucky again.
~Anonymous 0x9932FE2729B1D963
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(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday June 11 2015, @04:48PM
In this context the action of yelling "fire" may directly cause harm before it is perceived as speech.
I disagree. Prosecuting someone for yelling "fire" in a crowded theater when there is no fire is a prohibition on certain speech in certain circumstances. If someone chooses to react to the speech by panicking and harming others, that's on them and no one else. Speech can't cause direct harm unless it is loud enough to damage someone's eardrums or something such as that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @06:55PM
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We are talking about shades of grey here. I feel that the theatre scenario just qualifies for being interpreted as an action which causes harm directly, akin to punching someone in the face, since stupider people may be habituated to acting before parsing the information and evaluating its veracity (i.e. looking around for the signs of fire), and in this case we may be able to forgive them and blame the prankster. A few generations from now, if and when people are a bit smarter on average, we won't give them the benefit of the doubt anymore.
A more extreme example of this sort is a military commander who calmly says something like "you have a direct order to deploy at 1500", and as a result a private jumps from a plain at a certain time. If this commander knowingly drops a private into a volcano, the former should be prosecuted. This is no longer about speech, because a private is trained and habituated to obey orders, and has no reason to doubt an order without knowing all the circumstances. The commander could as well toss the private into the volcano with bare hands. The trick is to recognize that the "speechiness" of an utterance, even of a grammatically correct sentence, is dependent on the context. Here we have something akin to us saying "ls -l" to our computer, and the latter has no choice but to obey, so when someone says "/usr/local/bin/blow-up-hepless-victims.sh" we come after the typist, not after the computer or the explosive device.
We arguably do want people to be prosecuted for certain actions involving speech. Add to the example above a military intelligence official who falsifies a written report, which then leads directly to a pointless war on false premises. Given the right kind of context, we should be able to prove in court that the official directly caused the war, since this report could not have any other consequences, given its place within the system. Here too we have shades of grey, and you could very wisely observe that a bureaucracy which deals with this stuff should be robust enough to detect and crush a rogue actor or even a small conspiracy (that is, it's really the system's fault), but hopefully you get the gist of what I am saying.
~Anonymous 0x9932FE2729B1D963
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(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday June 11 2015, @07:06PM
I feel that the theatre scenario just qualifies for being interpreted as an action which causes harm directly, akin to punching someone in the face, since stupider people may be habituated to acting before parsing the information and evaluating its veracity (i.e. looking around for the signs of fire), and in this case we may be able to forgive them and blame the prankster.
Speech is still speech even if an idiot takes foolish actions in response to it. That's their own doing.
A more extreme example of this sort is a military commander who calmly says something like "you have a direct order to deploy at 1500", and as a result a private jumps from a plain at a certain time.
Just like you shouldn't follow illegal orders, you shouldn't follow orders like those, either.