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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: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday June 11 2015, @06:20PM
That is, however, exactly what this judge and the feds are doing here, except much, much worse because they're using the coercive power of the State. What others have said about this is quite on the money, that although the feds will likely not have enough to convict any of these posters they wish to de-anonymize, they will put them through hell, bankrupt them, and destroy their lives. It is tyranny.
"Well," one might say, "That's as it should be because words have meaning, and uttering them has consequences." Which is fine, except that's exactly the concept the judge is trying to evade, that she should face consequences for the words she uttered and the decisions she made. De-coupling those is a fundamental aspect of where this country has gone off the rails. Bankers get to perpetrate massive, un-heard of fraud on the American people and the government lauds them for it. CIA gets to torture people to death, and get a free pass. The NSA gets to completely unilaterally blow away the 4th Amendment of the Constitution, you know, the thing that it's supposed to take 2/3rds of the states to agree to change when you're talking about us lowly peons, and they get congratulated and affirmed. Federal judges get to order the FBI to terrorize citizens expressing anger about government excesses, though, because that's just beyond the pale, right? Yes, because expressing deep, abiding anger with the government and speaking about how they ought to be punished is vastly, vastly worse than actually torturing people to death, actually physically tapping every single communication from every American all the time, everywhere, actually stealing billions of real dollars from the American people that could have gone to, I don't know, schools or a cure for cancer, and actually setting the FBI on people who post on Internet forums to destroy their lives and teach them a lesson.
I sound like a broken record with this stuff, but the government has actually, physically, really done all these things and they are all heinous crimes. The government of the United States of America in 2015 has committed capital offenses across the board in the last 10 years. If 1 guy had done this stuff, he'd have been executed 1000 times over already. Watergate 50 years ago brought down an American President and all that was was a bunch of election shenanigans. Comparatively speaking it was on the level of a fraternity prank. Bill Clinton was impeached for getting a blowjob. But torture? Police state surveillance? Destroying several trillion dollars of the American people's wealth? Giving a guy multiple life sentences for running a website? Nah, no big deal. Mistakes were made. But those guys? You know, the ones who were mad about it? So terribly, terribly bad. So juvenile. Throw the book at those guys.
It's so far away from equivalent as to not be in the same universe.
I mean, I know you're trying to see the other side. You are truly not who I am aiming this at. But a government that tortures people to death doesn't get to turn around and call people who are angry on the Internet a threat to public safety.
Washington DC delenda est.