....unless you want to spend your winter at Camp Fema.. Loose tweets sink ships: Secret Service sets up hotline for suspicious web posts With less than two weeks to go before the US presidential election, the Secret Service is ramping up its intelligence-gathering efforts and asking Twitter users to report threatening tweets against politicians to a local field office. Debates over the November 6 election are already raging on social media: Users exchanged around 6.5 million tweets during the third presidential debate on Monday, and a few of the messages contained death threats against President Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney. Another 21 million tweets were made during the previous vice presidential and two presidential debates. The US Secret Service, which is tasked with protecting the president and top government officials, recently issued a statement on their Twitter account asking users to report threatening tweets: To report a tweet that concerns you, call the nearest field office in your state. The Secret Service opened their twitter account over a year ago. The organization maintains no other social media accounts, which hints at Twitters importance and usefulness in intelligence-gathering. Politics, hate and death threats The recent presidential debates ignited heated arguments on Twitter from supporters of both presidential candidates, with some making death threats against Obama and Romney: "Don't worry guys if Romney is elected as President I'll take the fall for you all and assassinate him", tweeted @kay_dizzle94. "I would love to shoot romney with a shotgun [sic]," tweeted @jasg30. "I have a 1 step plan: Kill Romney," declared @KeshiaCheesman. "Someone needs to assassinate Obama like ASAP", tweeted Alyssa Douglas. Ima hit president Obama with that Lee Harvey Oswald swag, wrote Donte Jamar Sims. Some of these threats are currently being investigated by the Secret Service. Although Twitter cannot disclose users locations, the agency has the means at [its] disposal to locate Twitter users, Secret Service spokesperson Ed Donovan told the Los Angeles Times. The organization could, for example, issue a court-approved subpoena to an Internet service provider. Sims, 21, from North Carolina was arrested in September and is accused of threatening to kill President Barack Obama in a series of Twitter messages, including one reading, "the Secret Service is gonna be defenseless once I aim the Assault Rifle at Barack's Forehead." He is currently in police custody. And 25-year-old Jarvis Britton of Alabama was also arrested last month and charged with death threats against the president after an anonymous caller reported a tweet that said, free speech? Really? Lets test this! Lets kill the president! Secret Service took action and interviewed Britton after they noticed other tweets on his feed referring to cyanide poisoning. Britton later sent out another tweet that read, Lets kill the president. F.E.A.R. He was arrested shortly afterward. He pleaded not guilty on October 16, but threats against the president are considered a felony in US, punishable by a fine and up to five years in prison. His fate remains unclear. Intelligence agencies interest in social media is not a new phenomenon. The FBI and local police have for years regularly monitored and collected information on US citizens on Facebook and Twitter. The FBI is reportedly attempting to create a system that would automatically monitor social media users. The bureau is attempting to build a network where suspicious posts would be flagged and instantly reveal the users location to authorities. http://rt.com/usa/news/secret-service-twitter-threat-207/
I suppose they would and do have to take serious threats on board, after all guns + Americans + Presidents, do not usually mix well. But they are getting way too carried away with all of this. It will just end up costing lots of money, to monitor throw away remarks, from people sat at home, in their pants.
You can't make assassination threats and not expect to be investigated, I recently saw that in England a radical group called the EDL went in a truck with over fifty members in balaclavas to a mosque when authorities saw a member posted this on Facebook they managed to stop it so using social media to investigate threats is just good planning. Though what are FEMA going to do? They couldn't even manage themselves right during disasters let alone anything else.
I just said. Serious threats should be given due attention. But there are literally tens of thousands of off the cuff, no real malice intended, things people say type remarks, that may sound 'threatening', but are, in practice, just comments. Comments people would have made, in conversation, long before Twitter came along. What about those that make comments that do not use Twitter? Maybe we could have kids listening into what their parents say, and report them for anti state remarks?
You can be Anti-state all you want that's protected as free speech, making assassination threats is massively on a different scale, they shouldn't be arrested but saying people shouldn't be concerned about such things is just negligence. Though comments of assassination is always taken seriously and always have been, many ex-confederate members who were claimed to have been overheard talking about assassinating the president were checked, though obviously this is slightly different but I don't doubt there is some people out there that believe Obama is a Muslim jihadist bent on bringing communism and a dictatorship, people who think this and say they are going to start a revolution or die trying are definitely up for suspicion.
Okay. In theory, what would happen if a comment like 'Hang the President' was to go viral, on every American's FB and Twitter account? What then?
If every American wanted Obama to be sent to the gallows then I would be concerned about the attitudes of people as that's a pretty serious thing, they couldn't stop every American. When someone says "someone needs to assassinate Obama... ASAP" that is a very serious thing, though put it this way if someone said "Can't wait until some sand (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*) tries to put a mosque up in my town, I'll burn it down with him and his family" I saw this comment (paraphrase though" about the "ground zero mosque" (still hear people saying that) this is a very serious thing as you don't know who might actually go through with it. Look at the example I gave about England and the EDL if someone never sent that Facebook post to the police they would have never known and who knows what they would have done (50 men in a truck with balaclavas is never a good sign) I'm not saying jail just a look into how serious the claims are if some business owner from Ohio says it, it's not really an issue if a member of a radical hostile group says it then maybe investigation is a good form of action.
Well, they are morons then. It would be akin to a serial killer having a FB page, dedicated to his deeds.
Looking at your country's hate speech laws we can see that England has more than its fair share of imbeciles. Spare us your hypocritical bleating...
to all ::::::::: i have found that my view of the USA foreign policy must change. I must regard the latest comments from the presidential campaign. at the last debate; president obama claimed that governor romney was not aware of the end of the cold war. all of us who want peace between russia and the USA should respect this fact about obama and not participate in all of these silly anti-obama games. vlad
Only the most credulous of fools would take President Obama's over-heated campaign rhetoric at face value. Mr. Romney is aware that the Cold War ended 20 years ago...
