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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: 3, Insightful) by jmoschner on Friday July 24 2015, @02:09PM

    by jmoschner (3296) on Friday July 24 2015, @02:09PM (#213150)

    It is a no-win scenario. If they don't look, then when some yahoo rambles on social media then kills a politician, there will be the outcry of "why wasn't someone monitoring social media." Then when they are monitoring, it appears as if they never find anything but false positives and miss actual threats.

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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 24 2015, @02:43PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday July 24 2015, @02:43PM (#213165) Journal

    Yet, when allies or even rivals tell the United States government specifically that specific people are specific threats, they can't put two and two together. (like the 9/11 hijackers or the Boston bombers).

    To me the government has degenerated into a grand exercise in misdirection meant to distract everyone while criminals rob the place blind. "Lookie there, everybody TERRORISTSSSS!!!" (quietly shovels several billion more from pension funds into pockets).

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Friday July 24 2015, @03:41PM

    by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Friday July 24 2015, @03:41PM (#213185)

    It is a no-win scenario. If they don't look, then when some yahoo rambles on social media then kills a politician, there will be the outcry of "why wasn't someone monitoring social media."

    The different complaints are mostly coming from different groups, and not all sides are equally correct. "It's a no-win scenario. If we don't allow the police to bust into everyone's houses for no reason and search their property to make sure they're not terrorists, people will complain about the next terrorist attack. If we do allow it, people will still complain! See, we might as well flip a coin!" Ignore the idiotic side as much as possible.