Homeland Security sends warning letter due bad tweet language | Hacker News Reader

Homeland Security sends warning letter due bad tweet language

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49 pointsatmosx44 comments

I mean... that's a little more than bad language.

I have heard of agents contacting individuals like this, but after someone reports it to the government. It's likely that someone on Twitter sent this as an FBI tip.

Not much else to comment on this post.

If this person has tweeted this out and then gone on to do a horrible act of violence, law enforcement would be blamed for inactivity against what would be described as an “obvious” threat. They kinda lose if they do, lose if they don’t.

Misleading title. Tweet calls for slaughter and arson; I don’t think the use of “fuck” was the problem.

Remove the "fuck" and it becomes TV friendly

What happened to the "stochastic terrorism" buzzword? Now it's good?

BTW, I've seen several previous stories of FBI agents visiting homes for non-criminal tweets (similarly inflammatory to this but again with no actionable call to violence; though those tweets were not viral nor progressive-aligned), so it's surprising that the DHS would merely send a cease and desist instead of the FBI actually interviewing the person at their home. Despite this letter seeming realistic, it might be more prudent to wait until media fact-checking. Searching Google for variations of "DHS cease and desist letter" yields zero results.

Notice this person is promoting an Onlyfans on her Twitter (good marketing!)

Title is editorialized. The warning is not for language, as plainly stated.

The tweet has been deleted. Here is the text of the letter it showed:

  June 29, 2022,

  [name redacted by me]
  [address redacted by OP]

  Ms. [name],

  This letter is in reference to your recent post on Twitter. Specifically, on
  June 4, 2022, you became upset at the Roe Vs Wade decision and stated,
  "Burn every fucking government building down right the fuck now.
  Slaughter them all. Fuck you god damn pigs."

  This letter is to advise you that any further communications containing any
  real or implied harassment/threats against the personal safety of agencies,
  employees or contractors towards government facilities are unwarranted
  and unwelcome. You are advised as of the date of this letter to cease and
  desist in any conduct deemed harassing/threatening in nature, when
  communicating to or about the federal government. Failure to comply with
  this request could result in the filing of criminal charges for violations of 18
  United States Code Statue 115.

  In closing, please refrain from any harassing/threatening language when
  contacting any government agency.

  Sincerely,

  Joshua Henry, Special Agent
  Threat Management Branch
  U.S Department of Homeland Security
  National Protection and Program Directorate
  Federal Protective Service
  Region 7 (TX, LA, AR, OK)

Notes:

- 25 days between tweet and letter issuance

- "Roe Vs Wade" instead of "Roe v. Wade", "Statue 115"

- Weird grammar around "towards government facilities" suggests standard language was slightly modified for this letter

- Mr. Henry forgot to put his signature on the letter

I wonder how many of these are going out.

I immediately wonder if anyone has bothered to authenticate this. I'm not saying DHS wouldn't do this, but anyone can send a letter...

> Joshua Henry, a special agent for DHS, confirmed the letter’s authenticity. Robert Sperling, Director of Communication for the Federal Protective Service, confirmed to The Dallas Morning News that the letter posted on Twitter was delivered.

> Henry said Walker sharing the letter on Twitter could bring more trouble.

> “She’s kind of taking it as a joke,” Henry said. “She’s not remorseful about these statements, so that’ll be presented a United States Attorney and they’ll make a decision on that.”

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2022/07/01/feds-show-u...

Perfect thanks! I figured someone had but with the tweet thread deleted it was hard to know.

Saying things like this really does open a person up to all sorts of problems.

It's easy to "be concerned" about a sentence that is not meant literally and report it, provide it as a crime tip or post an outraged response to it and attempt to cancel or cause other problems for the person who posted it.

Best to choose your words carefully and not give people ammunition to use against you.

The chilling effect at play, live.

That’s more than bad language. I don’t like govt spooks making house calls but the tweet could be used later as a claim she invited violence.

I've had house calls without a business card, at least they're being authentic.

Are you kidding me? Government law enforcement sent her a cease and desist and threatened to charge her for protected speech. It's not a gray area. The purpose of the letter was to harass and intimidate a citizen for criticizing their government and to create a chilling effect on free speech. I don't know what potential legal remedies she has since the government would have to waive sovereign immunity, but at the very least, this special agent and everyone on his team needs to undergo some civil rights training. At best, public employees like this agent and the chain of command pushing policies like this need to be completely removed from public service.

In what sense is calling on government buildings to be burned down and the occupants slaughtered "protected speech"?

The only way I could see it being protected is if it was clear hyperbole. Which...not in this day and age.

The question is not "how is something someone said considered free speech?"

The default is that what's said is protected.

The question should be "why is this speech not protected?" Does it incite violence if no violence occurred? Was it some kind of targeted threat or just impotent rage?

SCOTUS has outlined tests to determine whether speech is protected or not. These don't necessarily require violence to actually taken place as a result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action

> Under the imminent lawless action test, speech is not protected by the First Amendment if the speaker intends to incite a violation of the law that is both imminent and likely

This very obviously doesn't apply in this case.

It passes the imminence test which was further defined in Hess. It might fail the likelihood test, but of course, there was no legal action taken against this person so we're just making hypotheticals about what would happen if they did take legal action.

1A protects you from laws or actions that prohibit your speech, they don't protect you from people asking you not to engage in that speech.

It does protect you from the government asking you not to engage in speech. The fact that no legal action was taken is what makes this behavior blatantly unconstitutional. If it was against the law, DHS would have arrested her- instead they made vague threats about charging her under a law dealing with conspiring to murder federal law enforcement. Any government policy that creates a chilling effect on a protected right is unconstitutional, regardless of any charge or court case.

LE can use discretion when investigating cases that they believe may break the law, and they can give people warnings.

As I understand, other SCOTUS rulings on chilling effects all pertain to political speech that were otherwise clearly and unquestionably legal.

I think we’d need to have more information about the process and procedure that took place here to determine whether this letter was sent in bad faith or not.

Using the words "right now" may have been the icing on the cake for this one.

The court ruled in Hess v. Indiana that similar speech was legal because:

> [it] "amounted to nothing more than advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time."

It's still probably vague enough in specificity and context that I doubt SCOTUS would rule against it, but it's also plenty close enough that law enforcement wouldn't be out of line by following up on. It's also worth noting that this person simply got a letter, they weren't thrown in prison.

Standard first amendment exceptions:

  * Incitement to imminent lawless action
  * True threats
  * Solicitations to commit crimes

While this tweet doesn't quite meet those exceptions IMHO, it isn't an unreasonable position to take.

It has a chilling effect on everyone who reads about it. Threats against someone else for their political speech could mean something happens to any of us.

At what point do we consider this an act of terrorism on the part of HS?

It is plainly not terrorism for a law enforcement official to send someone a letter asking them not break the law. Even if it is questionable in its legal merit. LE are not lawyers or judges. It is entirely normal for law enforcement to arrest and charge people when they believe a law has been broken, even if they are wrong about it. That's the entire purpose of our court system.

It's not terrorism, and LE are not lawyers or judges, but they have a fundamental duty to have an understanding civil rights. Sure, maybe not understand the nuances of more complicated stuff in the moment- but that wasn't the case here. DHS obviously took some time to "investigate" and had ample opportunity to run all this by a government attorney or judge and didn't because the entire point is to curtail speech. Every beat cop knows "speech" is very broadly protected with very few exceptions, and this wasn't some random beat cop, it was a federal agent and so our expectations should be even higher.

Again, no one was arrested or charged. The courts were never involved on purpose; it was an extra-legal abuse of power.

I think you’re jumping to some conclusions that aren’t necessarily merited. We don’t know what DHS did or didn’t do beyond this letter, so I’m not going to speculate on that.

It is completely legal and common for LE to ask someone to stop doing something that approaches the limits of the law or could potentially lead to trouble. We have had recent attacks on federal buildings, in that context, asking someone not to incite further violence is hardly an abuse of power. I’m all for law enforcement reform, but this is a stretch.

I think the only conclusion that I'm jumping to is that it was malicious. At best, it's a bad and very likely unconstitutional policy.

Framing it as "asking" is dishonest- a cease and desist is a demand that you stop with an implied legal action if you don't. It didn't say "hey if this progresses, you might be criminally liable"- it calls out this specific tweet as potentially criminal and threatens federal charges.

As a side note, I tried to read the tweet again and it's been deleted, so who knows. Maybe all this was made up and maybe there was more to it or maybe DHS disappeared her. Either way, without more context I'm 100% unwilling to budge on this being an abuse of power.

If it was a malicious attempt to chill speech, why is it one letter sent to some rando on Twitter? Unless we see more people coming forward with the same experience, I’m more inclined to presume that this is more simply just a isolated instance of a whacky person posting whacky shit.

In the replies, other people are expressing that this happened to them, too. Here's one example: https://twitter.com/_the__snowflake/status/15427023930617774...

That link is dead for me.

Looks like the chilling effects are working. Here's an archived copy: https://archive.ph/aPlL5

It’s a photo of two business cards. I don’t see a letter or any claim of what it was about, let alone an accusation of misconduct.

The most obvious explanation here is that the guy made an illegal threat and the feds showed up to check out whether it was legitimate. That’s completely normal and legal, and not even refuted by anything at that link.

No this very clearly falls in the limitations of free speech since it calls for directly for violence against others. I want my government telling people to be careful about this

The tweet calls for burning down buildings and murder…I would surely hope DHS would look into such things.

The tweet seems to have been taken down. Did anyone save a screenshot?

I’m curious if there could be some kind of DDoS where someone creates bots that spout this kind of random bad language at scale and overload cease and desist processes.

Twitter is filled with bots, (or people) spouting angry rhetoric already. I suspect they originate from international adversaries because they play both sides of hot button issues, they tweet nothing about politics all day long, follow/follower counts are roughly equal, their sn's look generated and they have tribal tag lines and images. It doesn't make sense to me that these are real people, and their numbers are huge. Twitter really needs to get on top of this problem

It's really hard to tell whose a bot and whose not.

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/8whwmo9 covers a case where they hunted down someone they were sure was a bot and ended up being a real person.

Most astroturfing on the net is cheaper to do with low paid labor in content farms than with high paid developers. People are inclined to presume sloppy posts are automated, but similarly sloppy results happen when low paid ESL workers copy/paste content.

The pro move with political astroturfing is: don’t target the people who you want to influence, target people who are already inclined to agree with you. They’ll latch on to ideas that resonate with them and amplify your message out to a broader audience. You end up getting 50 “bots” for the price of one.

Ultimately you're DDoSing your own counter-terrorist forces.

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