Posted on 06/08/2015 4:32:55 PM PDT by Skepolitic
The United States Department of Justice is using federal grand jury subpoenas to identify anonymous commenters engaged in typical internet bluster and hyperbole in connection with the Silk Road prosecution. DOJ is targeting Reason.com, a leading libertarian website whose clever writing is eclipsed only by the blowhard stupidity of its commenting peanut gallery.
Why are the government using its vast power to identify these obnoxious asshats, and not the other tens of thousands who plague the internet?
Because these twerps mouthed off about a judge.
Last week, a source provided me with a federal grand jury subpoena. The subpoena1, issued by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, is directed to Reason.com in Washington, D.C.. The subpoena commands Reason to provide the grand jury "any and all identifying information"2 Reason has about participants in what the subpoena calls a "chat."
The "chat" in question is a comment thread on Nick Gillespie's May 31, 2015 article about Ross "Dread Pirate Roberts" Ulbricht's plea for leniency to the judge who would sentence him in the Silk Road prosecution. That plea, we know now, failed, as Ulbricht received a life sentence, with no possibility of parole.
Several commenters on the post found the sentence unjust, and vented their feelings in a rough manner. The grand jury subpoena specifies their comments and demands that Reason.com produce any identifying information on them.
(Excerpt) Read more at popehat.com ...
What you say makes sense.
However, if it were applied EQUALLY OR JUSTLY, I would have no problem.
The fact is that the 'law' is not being applied equally.
One can get on public TV and call for the murder of innocent American citizens, and that is declared LEGAL USE OF FREE SPEECH.
Doesn't need to be anywhere near that extreme. The only thing FR truly needs to "log" for each and every one of us to logon and comment are a user id and password.
As long as things like IP Addresses / Reverse DNS Lookups aren't logged, JimRob can turn over name and password till the cows come home and it won't affect anyone.
Having myself posted a rather long trail of bombastic "I hate this Goverment" and "waiting for the revolution to start" responses, I hope JimRob's not logging our IP addresses or doing reverse DNS lookups to see where we're coming from and logging that .....
Just sayin'....
The dope should have personally checked it out..
O'Reilly's people searched the Internet for strings of characters like "hate blacks" or four letter words with no regard of context, for example a poster might mention Cushitic as an Afro-Asiatic language -- O'Reilly would go nuts proclaiming that four letter words on FR worse than left wing sites.
There is the actual case of O'Reilly's charge of "hate" on FR when his people found the string of characters, "I hate blacks" on FR.
Never mind that it was a substring of a column title ("Why I Hate Blacks") in a San Francisco Asian publication. The FR thread was discussing the column and its author. Fox News John Gibson interviewed the author, cannot it be said that Fox News is a "hate" organization too?
Just for everyone's information.
Absolutely!
Rhywunl5.3l.15 @ 11:35AMIIt I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for that horrible woman.Nothing more or less from that commenter. I've seen much, much worse here at FR. If you don't believe me, read the subpeona at popehat's link.
For *all* the comments posted at that link? Some maybe, but not all.
Saying a judge should be harmed in a specific way in front of a courthouse -- yeah, I think that should be taken seriously. Especially given the country we live in today.
Saying one hopes there's a special place in hell for a judge (or any individual for that matter) is far from a threat.
By the way -- in order for a threat to be "real" ..... doesn't there have to be a demonstrated means/capability on the part of a poster to carry out that threat?
Not a lawyer here, just asking the question ....
No, people like you proposing polluting mother earth with your dirty right wing smoke. The FCC probably can't come down on you so they'll send in the EPA.
It was supposed be be a joke about why the EPA needs a SWAT team too.
Forget CB's, they don't get out far enough.
Now an enterprising amateur radio operator who knows how to connect computer to transmitter and send in CW, Digital Modes, SSTV, etc.. gets that message out WORLD WIDE quite easily.
And BTW: Some do. 6.925 USB --- just sayin'.
LOL! I gotcha. A bit slow this evening. ;)
No. The linked piece talks about the Hal Lindsey (Hal somebody, anyway) case.
All a subpoena is, is a fishing expedition. The authorities claim they want to see the person making the threat, and AFTER that, they will make a determination whether or not the poster might be taken seriously.
That makes sense, thanks.
Are we outsourcing our justice now too?!
The point of CBs would be they don’t. Imagine the NSA trying to figure that out.
Hope he takes your advice.
Right after the Elonis decision was issued? The Justice Department clearly has no sense of irony.
They're also very easily tracked. Back in "the day" we used to have fox hunts every weekend to hone our signal tracking skills.
Now amateur radio and low-band transmissions that use sky wave --- not so easy to track. IN fact, very difficult. Drive the federale's absolutely nuts.
I am not a computer guy particularly but can you imagine 100 million, cheap CB radios all buzzing with digital, encrypted various versions of every bodies grandma’s banana bread smothering the signal and each passing data along in Internet fashion?
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