Secret Service Harasses LJ Member

[snarkyman]

From jpicon: VERY, VERY important link. I implore you to please take the time to read it.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/anniesj/331112.html

So apparently, anything you say in your LJ about the president can get you a visit from the Secret Service. Anger and sarcasm expressed at W will cause you a world of pain.

anniesj made another post to clarify her feelings about her previous post. She just wants this to end.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/anniesj/331475.html

Sounds to me like she was scared but good, which is in fact the intention of the Bush regime. We need to defeat Bush and elect Karry next Tuesday. Please do your part.

QotD #1 (From memory - I'll attribute/fix later):
"Anything that helps enable a police state is bad for democracy."

QotD #2:
"We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder 'censorship,' we call it 'concern for commercial viability.'" -- David Mamet

UPDATE
Slashdot is now covering this story.
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/28/1326229

Comments

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

Okay, once mroe, with feeling:

Threats against the president = illegal. Always has been. If you are an adult in this country and don't know this by now, you haven't been paying attention, and ignorance of the law is no excuse. Secret Service recieves something that can be construed as a threat, they HAVE to check it out. They have no choice. They really don't. According to her, they talked with her for ten minutes, and decided she's not a threat. She was not harrassed. If she had done the same thing six months from now and Kerry was president, the exact same thing would happen.

It's unfortunete, but she did something stupid, and that will follow her. It's called consequences of your actions, and we all learned about that in kidnergarten.

What does suck is that it looks like someone forwarded that to the Secret Service with intent to cause her problems. And it worked.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

*applause*

[snarkyman.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know that threats against the president have (and should be) illegal. But I don't know that anniesj ever made a threat. Unfortunately, I don't have the option to judge for myself, since the original post has been deleted.

In case you haven't noticed, this kind of selective intimidation had increased dramatically since GWB came to power. Yes, the Secret Service are doing their job, but it is under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security. Again, with feeling, this kind of selective intimidation had increased dramatically since GWB came to power.

Agreed, that id does suck that someone forwarded it to the FBI/Secret service to cause anniesj problems.

Deleted, but screencapped

[actual-size.livejournal.com]

Here's the original post.

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

Re: Deleted, but screencapped

[eirehound.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm ... Not a threat. Not really. But then again the SS moves in strange and mysterious ways.

Praying to "God" for the death of the President may be in very poor taste, but I'd be loath to say that there was anything to it along the lines of "I'm going to buy a Mannlicher-Carcano by mailorder and set up shop in a book depository." (Hell, Michael Moore has done virtually as much as this writer did in formally published works, and his publishers' legal departments haven't quibbled.)

Unless, of course, the SS believe that a prayer to a divine power constitutes an actual attempt on the life of the President.

If so, exactly what would the SS do to prevent divine action? I mean, if I were an SS person and I saw Mother Kali materialise with her skulls and her dripping fangs and a sword in all eight arms, and stride across the Rose Garden straight toward the Oval Office, I would probably just stand aside and accept that the situation was not quite within my competence.

Maybe the SS is afraid that God will actually hear and answer prayers.

Re: Deleted, but screencapped

[siderea]

Unless, of course, the SS believe that a prayer to a divine power constitutes an actual attempt on the life of the President.

Possibly. 'pends on whether Bush has been purging members of the "reality-based community" from his service or not.

Re: Deleted, but screencapped

[eirehound.livejournal.com]

When, exactly, did he have any members of the "reality-based community" in his service? :-)

Re: Deleted, but screencapped

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Ooh, actual information! Yay.

if they're searching for the text ..."Please kill Bush"... well, then I'm fucked cause I just quoted it. But in general, it is creepy.

But I guess I'll stick with my original assessment -- the SS has way too much free time. I understand it's their job to follow up on crackpots who make threats toward their protectees, but damn.

Remember -- it's free speech, except when it ain't!

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

Couple things: As soon as that note landed in the hands of the Secret Service, they have extremely limited descretion. They have to act on it. Reading the thing that started all of this, knowing they sent only two guys for a chat in her living room leads me to think that the Secret Service kinda rolled their eyes, said, "well, we have to look into this, so..." and off they went. They wanted to do harrassment, they would have brought in and interrotgated her off her home turf. They didn't.

Also, I wonder if it's less "Bush is the Big Brother!" and more in the past four years communications have become increasingly efficent, and the paranoia of the people has increased. (There is a more expanded version of this speculation in kobold's journal.) It has more of a "naming names" feel than 1984.

[eirehound.livejournal.com]

I think that part of it may be that LJ'ers have a way of not really appreciating how far and fast a message can travel using modern elecronic media.

As an example, a number of years ago our friend Dean made a satirical PSA for a college radio station, featuring a "letter" to Dr. Laura Schlessinger asking her advice on some outrageous Biblical questions, such as what price one should get for selling one's sister into slavery (all based on actual Old Testament text). It was vicious and really made Old Testament literalism look pretty damn silly. He put the PSA into rotation at WHUS and more or less forgot about it.

Somebody out there in listener-land liked it. Liked it enough to cap it into an MP3, and distribute the MP3. Then somebody else transcribed it, and the text started making its way around the Internet. About a year and a half after Dean wrote this "letter", the text wound up being used in an episode of "The West Wing".

[eirehound.livejournal.com]

I want to say something very major. Probably a top-level post in my own journal is the place for it, but here it is in a nutshell.

Snitches, fear, governmental suspicion and harassment of individual people for their political beliefs, rampant manipulation of elections random surveillance of everyone ... where have I seen this before?

Oh, yes. The Gulag Archipelago. The Bush Administration is nowhere near the level of the Stalinist regime - for one thing, there are no labor camps out in Montana and North Dakota that I know of - but I'm begining to wonder whether "Stalinism Lite" is not likely to soon be a good description.