(no subject)

[kelliem]

Holy cow, this is scary: http://www.livejournal.com/users/anniesj/331112.html
(gakked from vagabondage)

Whatever happened to the right to free speech?

Comments

[jidabug.livejournal.com]

The Secret Service has always taken a dim view of any sort of talk about doing harm to the President. I don't think it's so much a free speech issue as it is that someone narcing to the governement about satire.

[katyabaturinsky.livejournal.com]

Whatever happened to the right to free speech?

The Patriot Act.

[kelliem.livejournal.com]

Yeah, though you would think that the Secret Service could have spent 10 minutes reading the thread and determined there was no actual threat involved. It sounds fairly clear from the person's post that it was a joking thread and obviously so. They didn't need to descend on the person's house and scare them half to death. That's overkill.

[kelliem.livejournal.com]

Silly me.

[katyabaturinsky.livejournal.com]

I know, we're silly that way. Thinking that one of the founding cornerstones of this country, a little piece of paper called The Bill of Rights, actually carried some weight. Silly rabbit, civil liberties aren't for you.

John Le Carré had a great piece in The LA Times on 10/20, called "If Le Carré Could Vote," in which he said:

Meanwhile, your Patriot Act has swept aside constitutional and civil liberties that took brave Americans 200 years to secure and were once the envy of a world that now looks on in horror, not just at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib but at what you are doing to yourselves.

The whole article is great, of course; frightening, but beautifully put.

[jidabug.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it was overkill, but the Secret Service has no sense of humor and there is never a time when it is acceptable to joke about doing harm to the president. They *must* investigate every "tip" they get, and just reading the thread wouldn't have been a very thorough job. For all they knew, there were other locked entries that were dead serious about such a thing.

[imkalena.livejournal.com]

OMFG.

[st-crispins.livejournal.com]

very scary. I posted the link on my lj too.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

The original post is here.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v161/baskil/anniesj-screencap.jpg

Just remember, the Interweb Is 4evR.

[st-crispins.livejournal.com]

You might not want to post that.

They'll be knocking on your door, too.

[sithdragn.livejournal.com]

That's overkill.

Overkill, and your tax dollars hard at work, yessiree.

I'm sorry, but one week till the election and that was amongst the most serious threats to Dubya to be had? I find that very difficult to believe.