Britain -Police Arrest Twitter And Facebook Users If They Make Anti-Muslim Statements

[taft2012]

But arresting people for speaking their minds? Imagine if this ever happened here? I mean, "malicious communication" - WTF is that?

They're just moderating the conversation Jimmy, not unlike your work here.

[jimnyc]

Also you're government is free to pop you out of your house tonight and hold you in a cell indefinitely, without trail or charge, if you are a terrorist, supporting a terrorist or involved in criminal activities rising to the level that is listed within the patriot act. Innocent people will not be involved in this, before you go thinking America is some bastion of freedom and europeans are shackled by our governments.

I fixed that for you. You would have a point if there were some sort of history of our country doing so to it's citizens, but it simply doesn't happen.

[Kathianne]

I fixed that for you. You would have a point if there were some sort of history of our country doing so to it's citizens, but it simply doesn't happen.

At least two times in our history, sedition laws were passed and enforced. Once under John Adams, again under Woodrow Wilson. People tended to rise up against the government overplaying its hand.

With what the IRS and other government enforcement agencies have been uncovered doing, people are concerned about speaking out and meeting. That's the 'chilling effect' at work.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

I fixed that for you. You would have a point if there were some sort of history of our country doing so to it's citizens, but it simply doesn't happen.

Alot has been happening under the public radar since obama was installed . How much more crap are we Americans goi ng to put up with from that ffing traitor? Where he a Republican his sorry ass would have already been impeached and anybody with at least normal IQ knows that is the truth!...-Tyr

[Kathianne]

Funny how I just ran into this via Drudge:

http://nationalreview.com/article/34...-espionage-act

Obama and the 1917 Espionage Act
The president uses the overly broad and little-used WWI-era law to go after reporters. By Michael Barone


<!--smart_paging_filter-->There is one problem with the entirely justified if self-interested media squawking about the Justice Department’s snooping into the phone records of multiple Associated Press reporters and Fox News’s James Rosen.


The problem is that what the AP reporters and Rosen did arguably violates the letter of the law.

It sounds as though this law criminalizes a lot of journalism. You might wonder how such a law ever got passed and why, for the last 90 years, it has very seldom produced prosecutions and investigations of journalists.

The answer: This is the Espionage Act of 1917, passed two months after the United States entered World War I. In his 1998 book Secrecy, the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tells the story of how it came into being.

Congress was responding to incidents of German espionage before the declaration of war. In July 1916, German agents blew up the Black Tom munitions dump in New York Harbor. The explosion was loud enough to be heard in Connecticut and Maryland. The Espionage Act was passed with bipartisan support in a Democratic Congress and strongly supported by President Woodrow Wilson, also a Democrat.


Wilson wanted even more. “Authority to exercise censorship over the press,� he wrote a senator, “is absolutely necessary.� He got that authority in May 1918 when Congress passed the Sedition Act, criminalizing, among other things, “abusive language� about the government.


Wilson’s Justice Department successfully prosecuted Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate who received 900,000 votes for president in 1912, for making statements opposing the war. The Wilson administration barred Socialist newspapers from the mails, jailed a filmmaker for making a movie about the Revolutionary War (don’t rile our British allies), and prosecuted a minister who claimed Jesus was a pacifist. German-language books were removed from libraries, German-language newspapers were forced out of business, and one state banned speaking German outdoors.


It was an ugly period in our history. It’s also a reminder that big-government liberals can be as much inclined to suppress civil liberties as small-government conservatives can — or more so.


Fortunately, things changed after Wilson left office. A Republican Congress allowed the Sedition Act to expire in 1921. Debs received 915,000 votes for president in 1920 while in Atlanta federal prison, but President Warren Harding, a former journalist and a Republican, commuted Debs’s sentence to time served, effective Christmas day 1921, and invited him to the White House.

...

[gabosaurus]

That would NEVER happen in this country! We're only going to arrest twitter and facebook users if they are conservatives.

[jimnyc]

Alot has been happening under the public radar since obama was installed . How much more crap are we Americans goi ng to put up with from that ffing traitor? Where he a Republican his sorry ass would have already been impeached and anybody with at least normal IQ knows that is the truth!...-Tyr

They do abuse their power, I have little doubt of that. I was just butting on on Noir's comment. Many years back when the patriot act was created, there was much talk about the same comments he made, and yet it has never happened. People thought citizens by the thousands were going to be rounded up and held forever without due process or a trial. This just simply hasn't happened. Most people that make those remarks likely haven't read the act in its entirety. It wouldn't surprise me if Obama looked into rounding up some reporters and holding them though, only to find out that it couldn't happen.

I DO think that the act is coming awfully close, in wording, to violating constitutional rights though. I think it should be rewritten and made so that it CAN'T ever be used outside of known terrorists and such, with absolute proof, and perhaps a warrant from a judge.

But unlike the UK sweeping in and arresting some, for supposedly criticizing Islam, the US hasn't acted on it's own citizens, outside of Jose Padilla, who they had proof on and was ultimately sentenced to like 10+ years in prison.