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

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!"?


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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @06:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @06:59AM (#213050)

    potentially every new born baby could killt he president.
    or rob a bank. or do something bad.

    luckily society attracts enough to the good side that these things are rare.

    now if the government wants back doors to encryption then we have to demand full transparency.
    you can spy on me (and everybody else) if you tell me that you're spying on me:
    like a banner that pops up whilst browsing the internet that says "we are watching you!".
    a publicly accessible database where everybody (and their grandmom) can check who and
    when the government was spying!

    because if we non-government people don't get REAL transparency, we have to protect our communications,
    because there is the real danger that we might be un-marked-jet flown to a non-transparent overseas
    prison-gulag and held near a beach that sounds like bacon until ... the first commercial fusion reactor comes online .. in 50 years.

    so in the same manner that transparently informing websurfers that they are at this very moment
    being monitored is the same as a policeman standing in front of the bank or the secret service
    standing in front of the president might help bad things not happening???

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @07:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @07:43AM (#213059)

    enter

    abuse