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.
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.cnsn...L20071207a.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.
At the risk of sounding like a troll, and at the same time avoid sounding like one, I guess the only thing the law allows me to say is, “I agree.”
Of course, I’ll leave it up to most dim witted of you to figure out what it is I am agreeing with. ; )
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