Trolls Take Note: Teacher Arrested For Leaving Offensive Anonymous Comment On Blog
Duncan Riley
56 comments »
We’ve previously covered the psychological reasoning behind anonymous blog trolls, but a new case in Wisconsin may cause some trolls to think twice prior to hitting the “Submit Comment” button.
Suburban Milwaukee high school chemistry teacher James Buss was arrested last week after leaving an anonymous comment on the Boots And Sabers political blog as part of a discussion on teacher’s salaries. Under the name of “Observer” James Buss wrote the following:
Looking at those teacher salary numbers in West Bend made me sick. $60,000 for a part time job were you ‘work’ maybe 5 hours per day and sit in the teachers lounge and smoke the rest of the time. Thanks God we won on the referendum. But whining here doesn’t stop the problem. We’ve got to get in back of the kids who have had enough of lazy, no good teachers and are fighting back. Kids like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold members of the Young Republicans club at Columbine. They knew how to deal with the overpaid teacher union thugs. One shot at a time! Too bad the liberals rip them; they were heroes and should be remembered that way
Police acquired the IP address of Buss from the blogs administrator then arrested him at his home at Cudahy, south of Milwaukee. Buss spent an hour in the Washington County jail before he was released on $350 bail.
According to local reports, officials are considering whether to charge Buss with disorderly conduct and unlawful use of computerized communication systems.
The validity of the charges will come down to whether Buss’ admiration of the Columbine Shooters and use of the phrase “one shot at a time” constitutes a threat or not. The ACLU and others are arguing that the comments are in poor taste, but do not constitute a threat and are therefore covered under the First Amendment.
A case we covered back in June saw the right to comment anonymously and remain anonymous headed to court, but here the blogs owner happily handed over the IP address to authorities. The moral is that really there is only very limited privacy when being a troll, unless you’re using an anonymizing service such as the TOR browser. Any blog owner can, and may well hand over identifying information should you leave an anonymous comment that comes to the attention of authorities, or others.
Very poor taste. However, this should be covered under free speech, as we could head down a very slippery slope.
“One shot at a time!” is not a threat; it’s hyperbole.
I can’t for the life of me see how anyone can seriously read Buss’s idiotic comments as a threat to anything other than his career.
I have to grudgingly side with the ACLU on this one. That the police would actually track him down and arrest him is astonishing. Then again, the unions are pretty powerful in that part of the country.
Looks like there are a lot of Wisconsin slashdot trolls who had better start minding their manners.
(Note: That last comment should be construed as helpful advice and is in no way a threat or designed to intimidate, malign, or cause constipation to slashdot, its posters, or affiliates.)
It’s scary that they give humans like this the license to teach kids.
It does not constitute a threat. 1st ammendment & free speech is our birthright as Americans.
Wouldnt a “anonymous proxy server” offer an author who truly wanted to remain anonymous the ability to do so?
Welcome, Big Brother, what took you so long?
You are 24 years late.
It is crazy that a random post on a blog can get you arrested now.
What is even more crazy is that, at least according to the Boots and Sabers blog post about it http://www.bootsandsabers.com/....._arrested/ it seems as if the guy used to be president of his local teachers’ union so he was basically tolling the website trying to cause trouble.
So I guess being an internet troll can get you arrested now!
Hmmm…I’m gonna have to say while the comment was extremely distasteful, it doesn’t seem like a threat to me. Idiotic yes. Worthy of psychiatric evaluation? Absolutely. But a legal offense? No.
Yes, everybody use Tor, that way some random guy somewhere else gets arrested for what you did.
Free speach and technology are entering a new erra. Interesting about how new laws will come about! I have read about lawsuits that have come about by comments like this that are left on servers from different countries and nothing can be done about it.
If this dickhead is cheering the columnbine murderers, he deserves jail time. Period. But no - don’t worry about his victims or their parents - just keeping convincing yourselves that you need your ‘free speech’…
I think most normal people hate trolls. But we should all hate that our most basic of rights is tossed about like dirty diapers by goof balls that write things online and then think they’re “media”.
I’d love to see a blogger arrested for saying something tasteless or controversial. Then we’d get the proper focus on the 1st amendment from the blogsphere…
I think you’re misusing the word “troll” here. Wikipedia will set your straight. This person was just a slightly obnoxious commenter with a warped sense of humor. But whatever.
We just publish the IP addresses of commenters in the comment itself if the person violates our user agreement. Since our user agreement requires that full real names be used, and nobody does that, we can pretty much publish anyone’s IP address if they get obnoxious.
Despicable as his comments are, aren’t they protected by the 1st amendment?
He’s an idiot. He should fired and serve time for stupidity.
Oh well, guess we\’ll have to start using anonymizing proxies.
FYI: TOR is no more anonymous than leaving posts via the “anonymous” username. TOR was broken a while back and has been listened into by both the US government and the entertainment industry. Actually, these two may be the same thing. Don’t use TOR if you are expecting secure communications. It’s just mostly secure.
@8 Yes, he’s a dickhead.. but your stance that he deserves jail time (period) for being one is quite worrying. Where do you draw the line?
When people are jailed for expressing offensive or unpopular opinions, you might as well pack up your blogs for good.
WWTCD?
Seriously, what would TechCrunch do in a case of controversial trollsmanship where some residing authority requested (voluntarily) the troll’s IP?
Also, after scouring for a privacy policy, I see none. Hmm…
that comment can be borderline theatening, but not to the extent of being arrested…at most, just a slap on the wrist - with some kind of informal warning
Am I the only one here who found this comment (albeit tasteless and perhaps too over the top) to be satirical in nature? Seems pretty blatant to me.
Only in America, Living in American police state is becoming complicated and not so worth it, day by day.
> Police acquired the IP address of Buss from the blogs administrator then arrested him at his home…
So, not China alone.. in fact, easier than China.. in this US? oh yes.. — presumably with a court warrant too??
So what he said is retarded but I have no idea how this wouldn’t fall under freedom of speech. There’s no threat, he’s simply stating that he has a retarded viewpoint. I’ve had retarded viewpoints in the past (and I’m sure a few in the present) that doesn’t mean I should go to jail.
Pat (#16)
I cant speak for TC because I don’t know that answer, but that was my point at the end: any site could hand over details, you just never know.
I can’t believe that they were able to seize that information so easily. They really had no reason to attain it and could not see a reason for anyone to give them a warrent to sieze it.
Looks like just some guy posting his opinion.
Anonymity on the net brings good _and_ bad.
For instance, this was posted on a website I run about 10 or 15 minutes before this post went up.
Anonymity is in every way an awful Star Wars analogy: some people will use it for good, such as a catharsis (see link above), and some people will use it to say incredibly awful, “I would get punched in the face if I ever said this in public”-style things.
Those using it be jackasses probably shouldn’t be arrested for it, though; that sets a curious precedent that gradually peels away the right to say anything anonymous at all, for good or bad or even blandly mundane.
Although judging by the sometimes knee-jerk reaction people have to Columbine-anything, it’s possible they really sincerely believed he was about to shoot up a school. That’s more a question of their competency, though, isn’t it?
Just show the IP adderss(es) of all comment posts, easy and simple “solution”
@25 - not innovative either, a lot of wiki sites do that.
TC is pretty self moderating, since any post/comment people don’t agree with usually gets shot down and destroyed in seconds. ( I’m sure Duncan can attest to that
)
That’s how it should be, where all check and balances are community driven. People learn pretty quickly that way.
Duncan is just sad that some people don’t like him.
The commenter was a bit obnoxious and sounds like an idiot. While he does have the right to free speech (within limits in the USA these days, sigh), the services we all post comments through online don’t have to protect you, as did occur here.
Still, reading this guys comment and the response from the local host and the police, it reinforces my contention that IQ tests should be required prior to allowing anyone to get pregnant. There are simply too many dumb and stoopid people in the world today!
Hi Duncan
Test with Tor - 1 - 2 - 3 - Can you hear me ok?
Tony
To Toby Netko:
You stupid piece of shit. What do you think
you can arrest people for exercising their freedom of
speech?! For posting blog entries that are not
politically correct? You shouldn’t even have an
American passport let alone be allowed to be a cop.
You have no respect for our American constitution..
like most cops.. and you should have your citizenship
revoked. If we wanted to live in a POLICE
STATE we would go to Iran or North Korea! Let me get
this clear to you: Posting a comment on a
weblog praising the columbine shooters is NOT illegal
you moron. Oh yeah, and “disorderly conduct,”
that catch-all charge, is NOT a criminal offense
either. Your comment, “What happens when you say bomb
in an airport? That’s free speech, isn’t it?…And
people are taken into custody for that all the time,”
exemplifies your stupidity. Don’t you think it might
make even a little bit of sense to distinguish when
someone says “I have a bomb” and when a person is
using it in a completely different context? Of course,
that would require you to have 2 functioning brain
cells. Do us ALL a favor and turn in your American
passport and move to Mexico you pig.
I encourage everyone to send an email to this city of West Bend to protest this blatant violation of our constitution.
dispatch@ci.west-bend.wi.us, mayor@ci.west-bend.wi.us, cityadmin@ci.west-bend.wi.us, mschanning@ci.west-bend.wi.us, netko@ci.west-bend.wi.us
Startup Earth
only comments that get deleted here are offensive and/or break laws (defamation on occasion for example), nothing more than that, and even then that means hardly ever from what I’m aware of. The fact that Alaska is still free to comment here attests to that
“…the TOR browser…” LOL.
As for those claiming that Tor isn’t anonymous anymore: it is. Tor’s *privacy* has been broken - so the 3rd Tor node in the circuit - the exit node - can see *what* are you sending and store this before passing it to the recipient. But the *anonymity* is untouched - the recipient only sees the exit (3rd) node, 3rd node only sees the 2nd… only the 1st (entry) node knows who you are, and it’s impossible to do otherwise (read about TCP/IP).
Screw you Duncan!
Yeah. Duncan Riley would *never* delete comments he just didn’t like.
good! perhaps this will scare the trolls off.
But there’s no denying the fact that there’s no end to trolling on the net.
List of “anti-american” IP-Revealing countries:
1. China
2. Israel
3. Russia
4. USA
Next time somebody bitches about a blogger’s identity being revealed in China, Israel or some other country….please remember this.
Also, for the love of god, if you want to post anonymously in this country…that’s why we have libraries, just make sure they don’t have a camera watching who logs on to the computer.
I hate Trolls, more should be done to curb this type behavior!
That’s why we are announcing Microsoft TrollTrapper 1.0 for Vista!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
The post that the teacher made in that forum is an example of something that Moby (yes, the musician) proposed that people do to help discredit conservative blogs and sites. Basically troll them and pretend you’re a “conservative” that holds extremely vile views.
Amazingly deceptive and immature as it pollutes any reasonable debate or discussion.
Chris R.
Your comment leads me to think you do not need “free speech”. Also, the teacher wasn’t threatening anyone, so why arrest him? There are Nazi sympathizers all over the US who think that killing Jews is okay, should we arrest them? Read some of the biographies of our founding fathers and you’ll see the “need” for free speech.
Here extreme bullies.
Look at this one 41 year old bully picked 13 year old.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12.....tml?ref=us
The teacher was obviously being sarcastic.
What’s disturbing is that he was arrested for this. The USA is now apparently a police state. I washed my hands of you guys a year ago when you legalised detention without rights to fair trial. Now you have travel restrictions (that’s right, you Americans need to apply for permission to fly 48 hours in advance now), on-line surveillance and arrest for saying the “wrong” thing and an executive who does what he likes.
It really is amazing what can happen in the space of a few mismanaged years! The USA was such a great country but is now the moral equivalent of Burma. Too bad. I really do hope you guys can get your act together and bring your country back to the ranks of the free world.
Where has freedom of speech gone? I know the comment was morally wrong but that teacher was entitled to his opinion, he shouldn’t have been arrested
Seems like a teacher would have more sense–speech isn’t free in this country anymore, remember?
My son was suspended for three days when he was in 7th grade because he said in an essay he wanted to blow up the school.
I’m sure this fellow’s school has similar policies. He just thought that only under the authoritarian rubric of elementary school such things happen?
I do think it is out of hand that he was arrested. His comments don’t rise to action, and without action his transgression is thought crime. I might hate what he said, but I still subscribe to the notion that words can never hurt me.
No sir, I don’t like it.
This is such a joke, because everyone knows there are trolls out there trying to get people in trouble (like, trying to make voters from one political party or another party seem like little whack jobs), so how on Earth can anyone tell the proper context or motive behind an anonymous posting anyways?
Here in Illinois, there’s a blog called Capitol Fax where lots of bloggers and politicians post stuff under either their real names, or sometimes a screen name, and there’s absolutely no login or registration required to post comments, so anyone can goof around. Well, back in January, just before our Illinois pols were getting sworn in, someone (plural even? there can be multiple trolls mucking around, no doubt), a bunch of us were seeing people suddenly getting banned for profanity, or comments were posted under someone else’s regular screen name, followed by the blog owner posting a comment (in red) saying he could tell it wasn’t the real regular poster, so then he’d delete the comment and perhaps ban the IP, right?
Well, someone apparently either emailed, posted, or used one of those contact forms, and they wrote some silly rant about the Illinois governor, but from what they were running around showing people while trying to see if they could badger a confession out of ya if you’d wrote the thing, there was nothing overt. I mean, it even looked fake and silly and trollish to the average person, let alone if they’d gotten a real forensic shrink to do some serious personality profiling.
So, nothing really happened, but they were running around looking for whoever wrote this thing, and you should have seen it. It was silly. Stuff like someone hoped the governor got thrown in jail for corruption, or something. And a lot of swearing, but that looked like the worst extent of it.
So, now we’ve got the Hyperbole Police out on patrol knocking on doors in suburbia over nonsense, and we’ve got the Potty Police tapping their feet in bathroom stalls trying to bust supposedly gay come-ons in public restrooms. Meanwhile, some nut STILL managed to shoot a bunch of people at a Nebraska mall, and the 9/11 terrorists darn nearly took out the Pentagon.
Do you feel safer? I don’t. Now, you’re more afraid of boneheaded Keystone Cops.
Seriously. This needs to go far beyond the ACLU. The national cable news channels need to start dragging these cases out there so everyone can have a national debate about it. Of course people want the police to err on the side of caution, but when even the average Joe or Jane can see that some of this stuff is just really bad hyperbole, yet they’re going beyond questioning the guy and arresting him, that’s awful. He could have volunteered to take a polygraph to show that no, he’s not really planning any act of violence, and that could have been a voluntary way to at least calm them down a bit if there was any doubt. But a full-blown arrest? And it’s not even explicitly clear if it’s a threat, yet this guy now has a nasty mark on his record, that there’s a police report that he was arrested? That’s terrible.
He sounds like a loser for the trollish behavior, but I hope someone wins this one, and that it’s NOT the police in Wisconsin.
HAS THE WORLD GONE MAD?
Even here,In the supposedly reasonable Blogsphere,most of the users(exept maybe one or two) are treating this issue so calmly!
So much reservation is beign expressed about “How awful,are the things he’s saying” et cetra et cetra, before FINALLY,you say that “I suppose that maybe…I guess he is covered by free speech,despite of what he is saying”.
Have you all lost your senses?!?!?!?!
Being prosecuted is the least of his problems,since I don’t really believe that any court in the world would ever condemn him.
His real problems are in the civic field.
Not only,that the police persecuted him,violated his privacy,threw him in jail,made him a whole bunch of trouble…But he also became publicly known,his job will be lost,he will be expelled from his social position(he is the head of some association),we all know that he would be discriminated, and from now on I doubht he would be able to get a good job once his employers will hear about this little affair.
Does this sounds proportional to you?
A man who’s dedicated his life to education,the is the only thing he knows how to do,will be forced to start his life from scratch discarding all his previous achievments and all of this because of something that he said?!?!
I don’t know if this is indeed a political arrest,or just segments of “Police Officials Gone Wild”(a new reallity show which FOX is planning),but either way,they ruin people lives for the sake of public entartaiment\satisfaction.
As for the comment itself…What have become of you?!
Is this really the first time you have encountered someone who deliberatly said something in exaggeration in order to show how ridiculuos it is and thus emphasizing its own point?
I for example used this technique countless times,and I would have been horrified if I was suddenly aressted.
Anyone remembers the Cruiser Missile joke? Somehow this brings back bad memories.
Sarcasm is wasted on the stupid. What he said was clearly sardonic. The fact that the majority of mopes reading it were unable to discern that does *not* make it criminal behavior. In any universe. This is despicable overreaction and abuse of process by authorities. What next? Do we start arresting people for having ‘unpopular’ opinions? Where does that train stop?
People need to get a sense of proportion. There was *no* threat implied in his comments whatsoever. Alluding to Columbine is hardly the same as threatening violence. If this is so, then I wonder how long it will be before the KKK and any members of white supremacist groups are summarily rounded up and incarcerated. While they are at it, they could also gather up Don King and others who promote/incite anti-white sentiment… is that not a call to violence? good grief.
You know what makes me the most sad? Not only that such a thing could happen AT ALL in the United States, but that I am hearing people who think this is OK. Sad, sad sad, our Forefathers have to be spinning in their graves. They were *explicit* about the need for absolute Freedom of Speech, because they knew all too well the dangers of letting the State decide what is, and is not, ‘proper.’
God help us all, because it is clear our elected officials have no intention to.
Tired of Big Brother,I agree with you.
You have to be pretty darn stupid not to notice the sarcasm in his words,however what I have understood from the majority of the replies around here and from the main article itself is that most of the people here are regarding his post as an inflammatory agitating trollying,which was meant to impersonate as the other side and thus deny its relevancy in the debate.
It’s a pretty low thing to do.
Nevertheless,no one deserves this kind of thing,not even a troll.
In this particular case,however,the only exuse for not seeing the sarcasm and classifying this teacher as a troll,is if your IQ test can prove that you are in fact a rock.
A very stupid rock I must add!
As soon as people start getting charged for “disorderly conduct” in a virtual space - not hacking, not deaths threats - but “disorderly conduct” the precedent is set for the death of the internet. Disorderly conduct is a very subjective and slippery interpretation even in real time, open to all kinds of frivolous application. What next, people will be charged with disturbing the peace for using uppercase? Not good.
Everyone write into the national cable news networks asking them to keep covering these issues of out-of-line cops, please. Perhaps the “sunligh” of public and media scrutiny will help draw attention to the issue.
Some of us here in Illinois, I swear to God, were just about ready to go call up the ACLU and all the media stations after getting a visit from the Illinois State Police who were running around last January over some blog posting type thing. Unless there was more than they showed, it was a complete farce and a joke. Someone was merely swearing up a storm, and the police were asking (they were let in, obviously, because you think something happened in the neighborhood, right?), “Who talks like this?!”
Who talks like this?? What were they, the Pottymouth Police???
I am so not kidding! In Illinois, the most corrupt state in the union. It isn’t just Wisconsin.
So please write the media and the good columnists who write for your local main newspapers with the following message: KEEP ON THIS ISSUE.
Please. If you do something positive to end the year, make it a reminder to the press what you’d like to see covered. And cheers to the media and bloggers who are already on this Wisconsin case. Troll or no troll, he didn’t need to be arrested. That’s just out of line. You can understand if someone screams to high Heaven on your block, and then there’s a “disorderly conduct” issue (but wouldn’t the police first just tell the person to knock it off already, unless they were totally drunk, or something?), but this was online. NO ONE can tell proper context. And where was his warning?
The reason most hyperbole is overlooked is because most people aren’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. Political blogs have politicians posting on them at times, some with police protection around them, so naturally, those are places ripe for extra scrutiny. But even so, why not a warning first? Unbelievable.
Oh, and here in Illinois, when they were running around trying to badger it out of people who visited a certain political blog’s website, if you volunteered to take a polygraph to get them to buzz off, they didn’t even want to do it, right? When they thought you were seriously going to do just that, all of a sudden they hemmed and hawed and went, “OK, we’re letting you go.” See? Even they know they’re way out of line. They don’t want the polygraph PROOF showing how stupid and idiotic they are, probably.
It is NOT a crime to swear about your public officials, and it is certainly NOT a crime to make really bad taste cracks about Columbine. There are millions of people with really black humor out there (case in point: how come Ann Coulter is never arrested for inciting anyone to forcibly convert people to Christianity after killing their leaders? Ann should’ve been arrested quite a few times if the Hyperbole Police are so accurate that they’re well within the scope of the law, right?).
If ANYONE ever has problems with the Illinois or Wisconsin State Police…CALL THE MEDIA PRONTO.
This teacher - James Buss - was attempting to “entrap” conservative commenters on the blog by getting them to agree with him on the Columbine bit. He even admitted it to the press:
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/vi.....1207a.html
Politics aside, this is about First Amendment rights. Were his comments tastless and frightening? Yes, I’m sure they were. But think for a moment about the comments we all make, every day, that are sarcastic, and even a little “dark”? Haven’t you ever heard yourself say, “I’d like to kill that jerk!”? If not, then you’re a better human than I.
Buss, even if he were serious - which he wasn’t - should still have the right to say what he said. People allow the fear to take over their basic rights as free people, and that’s why we’re even having this conversation. I would rather live in fear of some freak accident than live in fear every day for being arrested for something I say.
Think about this: Today we can’t say cheeky comments about Columbine for fear of being simply arrested, but what’s in store for the future, and what “speech” will be considered “hateful” then? Will we be incarcerated for something that we may have said in a sarcastic manner?
As for James Buss, he was attempting to entrap someone, by exercising his First Amendment rights, to then attempt to take someone else’s away. The conservative/liberal thing is neither here, nor there. It could have worked the other way around just as easily. There are nimwits on both sides of the aisle, and I don’t believe that most Americans think that way. The issue is that our rights are being attacked. This man was arrested for a sarcastic comment, which is nothing short of ‘thought policing’, and everyone who has ever left a smart-assed, tongue-in-cheek comment on a website should be concerned about this. We should be thankful that the man wasn’t found guilty of anything by way of his speech, and we should be very concerned that he was arrested at all.