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The Secret Agents Who Stake Out the Ugliest Corners of the Internet

posted by cmn32480 on Friday July 24 2015, @05:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the it-really-isn't-a-secret-anymore-is-it? dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Sifting through those messages to determine which, if any, need to be taken seriously is the responsibility of the Secret Service Internet Threat Desk, a group of agents tasked with identifying and assessing online threats to the president and his family. The first part of this mission—finding threats—is in many ways made easier by the Internet: all you have to do is search! Pulling up every tweet which uses the words "Obama" and "assassinate" takes mere seconds, and the Secret Service has tried to make it easier for people to draw threats to its attention by setting up its own Twitter handle, @secretservice, for users to report threatening messages to.

But if the Internet makes it easier to find threats directed at the president, it can also make it harder to figure out which ones should be taken seriously. The sheer volume of threatening messages online, the lack of context, and the ease with which users can shield their identities all contribute to the challenges of assessing online threats. One series of tweets addressed to @POTUS that caught the Secret Service's attention—at least enough to warrant an in-person visit from an agent—came from a user with the handle @jeffgully49 and included a picture showing a doctored version of the president's campaign posters with his head in a noose and the word "HOPE" changed to "ROPE." The messages were apparently posted by Jeff Gullickson of Plymouth, Minnesota, who was later visited at his home by a Secret Service agent. "The agent from the secret service was cordial," Gullickson wrote in an email to MPR News, adding that the agent just wanted to be sure his tweets were not serious threats.

Isn't the first rule of Fight Club supposed to be, "Do NOT talk about Fight Club!"?

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday July 24 2015, @06:01AM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday July 24 2015, @06:01AM (#213044) Journal

    Recent twist:

    Homeland Security Chief Goes Off "Going Dark" Script, Says He Can See Plenty [firstlook.org]

    “I’ve been at this now for six and a half years, and we have since 9/11 I believe come a long way in the level of sophistication of our intelligence community and their ability to track and detect potential threats to our homeland from overseas,” Johnson said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.

    FBI Director James Comey, who opened the annual Aspen conference on Wednesday night, warned that his agency is “going dark” because of the use of unbreakable end-to-end encryption. It’s an argument Comey has been making for months now.

    Johnson’s comments were a reminder that authorities can see plenty.

    “We have developed good capabilities to detect plotting, to detect efforts to do something bad in our homeland,” he said.

    He then added that he wasn’t disputing Comey’s conclusion. “Um, we do have the problem of going dark that Jim talked about last night, very definitely.”

    Johnson’s explanation for the disconnect between his statements — that our intelligence is good, but we’re still going dark — was that the “homegrown threat” is “harder to detect in many ways,” which he claims “is why … a number of us are so concerned about how this whole thing is developing.”

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @07:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @07:41AM (#213058)

    What a rambling moron.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @09:12AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @09:12AM (#213075)

      Will the opensource devs cave or will they defy and fight.

    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday July 24 2015, @04:38PM

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Friday July 24 2015, @04:38PM (#213209) Journal

      Good lord who is this guy, the head of the Spanish Inquisition?

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 24 2015, @02:36PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday July 24 2015, @02:36PM (#213160) Journal

    Anybody in government who uses the execrable term, "homeland," to refer to America needs to be summarily fired, stripped of his citizenship, and exiled to North Korea.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 24 2015, @02:37PM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 24 2015, @02:37PM (#213161) Journal

      WHEW! For a second there, I thought you wanted to send them to North Ireland!