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Comment by foobarer | Hacker News Reader

In Soviet Russia you do not critique the government, the government critiques you. If necessary, jails you. If absolutely necessary, poisons you with Polonium-210.

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If someone in the US posted publicly about bringing "bottles, fabric, gasoline, turpentine, foam plastic" to a protest, they'd get a visit from the FBI. Speech that incites violence is something they investigate regularly.

It looks like he didn't post any of that though.

Exactly. It looks like. You can't just blame authorities because they arrested him for investigation while the only thing you know is that it looks like he hasn't written them.

The thing is they have already had people been sent to prison for a single "like" in social networks or for expression of dislike in comments section. It didn't look like somebody cared to investigate anything. Something tells me it wouldn't be surprising at all if the "arrested for investigation" is turned into "sent to jail" in this case, too.

They have to make sure he didn't queue up messages to be automatically posted according to a predetermined schedule while he was establishing an alibi away from his computer.

Obviously he's a FOSS extremist..

I don't think everything that's transpired is right, but if that situation played out in the US, I'd expect the FBI to investigate in an attempt to find out who posted a call to violence online.

The first person of interest would most likely be the user of the IP address at that time.

It's unfortunate that operators of Tor exit nodes have a large amount of risk placed on them, but I don't think it's a situation borne of Soviet-era backwardness or unique to modern Russia.

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