The thing that alarms me is the possible repercussions she mentions that she could suffer despite the fact that the Secret Service verified that she was harmless.
Well I do know the poster in question. We moved in the same circles for a long time, and were on each other’s FLs until our fandoms diverged.
She is prone to hyperbole, and anybody who reads her LJ knows this. My concern isn’t what the Secret Service did. That was their job. My concern is that somebody either is so out of touch with reality that they think Annie was plotting the death of president, or alternately, they think that it’s perfectly acceptable to get the FBI involved in a fandom grudge.
She’s a sweet, smart girl and an excellent writer. I don’t think she deserves to have a permanent FBI record for this, or to be involved in such a mess at all, but I recognize that blaming it on the government is completely stupid. We have to blame the asshat who decided, for whatever reason, that calling the FBI was appropriate.
OK, the original post was childishly idiotic, but it’s clearly facetious and not a serious intention to harm Bush. If she had written, “I will kill the president and here’s how and when,” then the SS would have reason to be involved. But that post was so non-specific and obviously not serious that it’s ludicrous for the SS to have acted as it were a viable threat. Do they go after every person who makes a sardonic comment about the president’s health. Should we not mention pretzels, because those are lethal in the wrong hands? (Granted, those hands belong to Dubya, but still…)
Heck, I cracked a tasteless joke IRL about telling Hinckley that Bush was dating Jodi Foster. Was it tacky? Yes. Should I have said it? Probably not. Does it merit serious attention from the SS? Hardly.
Did Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine get a visit from the SS for writing Assassins?
Did Nicholson Baker get visited for writing Checkpoint?
Should anyone who owns a copy of The Manchurian Candidate turn themselves in to Homeland Security for processing?
Certainly the SS should keep an eye on legitimate threats to the president’s security, but their inability to triage free speech from real threats seems to indicate that we are unwittingly enacting a lese majeste policy in which one may not speak disparagingly of the president, as if he were a monarch or dictator. (I, of course, am a loyal servant of the Party and of Our Leader. Hail Dubya and confusion to the liberals!)
However, you’re missing an important fact, here, gobear. The LJ writer was reported to the Secret Service by a third party.
It’s not like the Secret Service is trolling through LJ posts, looking for invective against the President so they can send out the cars. Yes, what she wrote was obviously facetious and not intended as a true threat, but once someone makes a complaint, they have to investigate to close out the complaint. I’m sure that they’re just as eye-rolling about the idea as you are.
So all you have to do to make sure that someone is permanently on file with the FBI, with all the negative repercussions that might involve, is to report them to the Secret Service, whether or not the person has actually done anything worthy of reporting?
That’s kind of scary, to say the least.
To follow up on that-
If the Secret Service hadn’t investigated the incident, and said LJ poster later made some attempt to kill the President, do you think the press and politicians would support the Secret Service and state, “Well, it was just a crank letter, so it’s right not to investigate,” or do you think they’d be raking the Secret Service over the coals for their lack of action?
This isn’t about limiting speech and forcing some sort of “must talk nice about the President” rule. This is about a government agency covering its ass so that it doesn’t look like the fools that the CIA and FBI did following 9/11.
You make a good point, JohnCorrado, but it stll seems too easy to ruin a person’s life with just one phone call.
Well, it depends on what you mean by ‘ruined’. She had to spend 10 minutes in an interview with the Secret Service, which I can imagine to be extremely scary and intense… but it seems like the agents were polite, understood the crank-level of what they were investigating, and made no bones about it.
She does have a file on her now. But then, so do a lot of people for reasons they may not even know about- for having checked certain books out of the library, or having attended certain public rallies, or whatnot. But there are very few situations in her life where this file is going to come back and haunt her; unless she plans on a career in the government or certain branches of the military, no one cares. And even if she does plan on such a career, that file probably won’t be held against her so long as she is open about it.
I guess I’m a bit blase about it because I grew up in Washington and knew plenty of people who still managed to get good or high-clearance government work despite doing really stupid things. And because I know some people who tried to get into such lines of work, and desperately deserved to have their careers ruined by such a phone call, and they were. (Point of example- my wife’s ex-boyfriend, an unstable and maniupulative jerk, who had constant wet dreams of becoming a police officer. While it’s likely he would have washed out of the academy, I think it worked out better that he listed as one of his references a friend of his who he had recently had a nasty falling out with, and who was not afraid to speak his true mind to the officer doing a background check.)
The bottom line is that you gotta be dumber than a stump to post something like this on the Internet, especially given the current social and political landscape.
I am thrilled that the Secret Service followed up on it. Absolutely thrilled. And yes, the notion that this could tarnish he in the future is worrisome.
There must be some sort of a threshold for a reasonable complaint, though. I don’t think that post can reasonably be construed as a threat. A facetious prayer petitioning for GWB to overdose on cocaine, or for him and his entire administration to top themselves? It’s not like she said “Golly, it’d be swell if someone shot that sonofabitch.” How does a mock prayer for someone to do themself harm consititutes a threat?
You could make a stronger argument that the organizers of the Presidential Prayer Team are guilty of voter fraud for attempting to illegally influence the vote through November 1st “prayer rallies.” After all, they’re sincere in their belief that prayer brings about tangible results.
Still, I would hope that investigators would tell anyone making such a complaint that it was a primae facie stupid one, and not waste resources by sending anyone out to conduct interviews on the subject.
Suffering christ.
I think the former case is more probable than the latter, but either case is obviously so ludicrously improbable that it hardly bears speculating about.
What if I went to the authorities with my concern that a specific individual might consitute a threat to the presidency because he was seen buying a bag of pretzels on the way to a Bush/Cheney rally? Should such a complaint be investigated as a matter of course in order to cover asses in the unlikely event that John Doe waits until W’s throat is all dry from speechifying and then tries to do him in with a salty bread product? Or should the authorities look me in the eye and say “Buddy, sometimes a snack is just a snack. Go waste somebody else’s time?”
How exactly is the FBI file going to tarnish someone’s future? Doesn’t it just mean that the person will if checked through the FBI come back with a result that “she is not suspected of anything”. Perhapse better than a result “this individual is unknown to us”.
But she may have felt like she didn’t need to worry about it because it’s her livejournal. She is very well known in several fandoms, and so her LJ gets a lot of traffic–fannish things mostly. But everybody who gets a lot of reads still has the possessive “this is my livejournal.” Also, she’s a big part of the community, and despite fights and flame wars, people still have a false sense of security regarding that community. In a way, she may have felt she was just speaking in her home and allowing people she thought she could trust to view those thoughts.
Dumb as a post? No, I don’t agree with that. Lulled into a false sense of security? Yes. Naive? Sure. There are a lot of jerks out there. But sometimes we fall forget that LJ posts (unlocked or even locked) aren’t personal, and I hate the fact that that was her mistake.
Everybody is crawling all over this because of the secret service thing, when I find the LJ politics much more frightening. People have grudges all over LJ, but somebody went to the fucking FBI. It should be a wake up call that something is rotton in our community, not that our president is a tyrant. :rolleyes:
I also grew up near DC. At certain events, there were always visible secret service agents. This month I answered a political survey over the phone. When asked my views on Bush, I gave the required rating from 1-5 and said “I can’t stand him and I want to get him out of office.” Immediately after I said that I added “By peaceful and legal means. I am in no way advocating violence against the President.”
I am not kidding or exaggerating for effect. I actually said that.
The secret service investigates threats not only because they may turn out to real dangers, but to discourage people from making threats. They are trying to reduce the size of the haystack. If people know that making a threat against the President will result in an investigation, most people will be careful to express their feelings about the President in other ways. This results in less threats needing to be investigated, and a higher chance that an investigation will uncover a real danger.
You know why this is bullshit? Because there is no threat there.
I agree that the secret service should investigate all actually threats too.
This is no worse or better than saying to someone as you stand on a street corner, “Oh, just die already.”
And then some self apointed idiot calling the cops, and saying you threatened someone with DEATH.
And then the police are such morons they choose to maintain a file on you under “tries to kill people with their mind”.
Personally, I wish God would smite people on a daily basis, usually in traffic. I also tell people to do anatomical impossible things, and threaten small children with cannibalism when I am overcome with their cuteness.
I wish God would make a rolleyes big enough to express the stupidity of this.