In another thread someone posted a link to a collection of tweets from last night advocating the assassination of the President of the United States.
A few questions:
Is the Secret Service likely to be able to track down the authors of these tweets?
If so, will they do so?
And having identified the authors, what sort of action is likely to result? Observation? Questioning? Arrest? Prosecution?
At the very least they will probably get a knock on the door and an interview. The secret service can get records from Twitter and local ISP’s to track someone down. See here:
I doubt any of those in the linked article will be observed or questioned. I seem to recall that although the Secret Service investigates all threats and takes all threats seriously, they are able to dismiss most after a preliminary investigation. In this instance, it’s obvious that most of these people are giving voice to sour grapes over their candidate losing the election, and that the thrust of their comments is (crudely) satyrical. I’m sure none of us think any of these people will actually attempt to kill the president. The Secret Service doesn’t either, but they’ll at least perform due diligence before writing them off. Maybe look at previous and future tweets for a pattern of this kind of thing, or check out social media or public records for any red flags. Meeting with every one of these individuals would tie up an enormous amount of resources. Resources that are best used against legitimate threats, as opposed to teaching every little 17-year old asshole on Twitter a lesson.
On the other hand, if one of those actually assassinates the President, or even tries to, and it becomes known that the Secret Service knew about them but ‘wrote them off’ without even bothering to interview them, … well, it won’t do much for their career path in the Secret Service!
And government bureaucrats pay attention to that kind of thing.
The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was so desperate to prevent people finding out that they had interviewed Oswald (and dismissed him) that they lied to the Warren Commission and falsified transcripts.
Often times it doesn’t even take that. Many people use their real names on Twitter or something close enough (or post pictures) that make it easy enough to find their facebook profiles. From there a simple whitepages.com search and you’ll have their home address in a matter of minutes without any phone calls or warrants or anything.
As I said in the other thread, I’d guess most of them are joking, but the person that put the bounty on the presidents head needs to be taken seriously. It might not be any more of a threat then the others, but someone else might take it seriously. The SS also needs to keep up appearances. We all hear the stories and watch the documentaries, but from time to time they need to make an IRL example out of someone. Besides, people really should know better then to call for the president’s death on a social media outlet. OTOH, I saw an interview with one of these people today, she seemed…well, she seemed pretty stupid. Even if she believed what she said, she had the perfect opportunity to apologize, shut her mouth and maybe back pedal a bit but she chose to just keep digging deeper.
Something else I said in the other thread, I had a friend in college that, if he said something like that, yeah, it should probably get looked in to. He always seemed like the kind of person that could snap at any minute.
I don’t know if the SS has branches around the country or people that are paid just to check this stuff out, but in the interest of saving money, I wonder if they can send local FBI people out. Just to do some basic due diligence. Someone that can say “Yeah, we think she’s fine, and after our visit she’s not going to make this mistake again” or “We’re not sure, we’ve got him in the station until someone from DC can get down here to make their own decision.”
They do have offices around the country. Even if the president isn’t everywhere, counterfeit money is.