That makes sense logically. I don’t know anything about the legal argument though.
Also, I'm surprised the NPR ran this article, given the disclaimer at the bottom that it's a party to it. Usually the lawyers just don't let you do that.
That's sophistry and confuses the issue. One is absolutely not acting as an FBI agent when forging FBI documents. There is a clear and common-sense difference between impersonation and forgery, and you seem to be misusing language to willfully misunderstand the difference.
When you're forging the document, you are not pretending to be an FBI agent. You are being a forger. The forger then claims that the FBI made the document.
Saying, "The FBI made these documents and here they are" is fundamentally different than saying, "I made these documents and am with the FBI." They do not collapse into the same thing.
To be honest, I still would hope forging FBI documents is a crime in the same way that impersonating an FBI agent is a crime; however that's a matter of law. It is a matter of fact that forgery and impersonation are different. One is falsifying documents, the other is falsifying identity. If you want to say that both can be reduced to falsification or deception, sure, but that's not a crime. Forgery (falsifying documents) and impersonation (falsifying identity) are crimes, and separate ones.
I think it's fair to say that someone creating a document with FBI letterhead/signatures/etc. is pretending to be an FBI agent.
And if they don't, nobody knows this, so nobody has cause to think that they are an agent. They can't really impersonate an FBI agent to themselves because they know that's not true.
Thus, if nobody thinks they're an FBI agent, how can they have impersonated one?
> Whoever falsely assumes or pretends to be an officer or employee acting under the authority of the United States or any department, agency or officer thereof, and acts as such, or in such pretended character demands or obtains any money, paper, document, or thing of value, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
> Whoever falsely assumes or pretends to be an officer or employee acting under the authority of the United States or any department, agency or officer thereof, and acts as such
If the twitter account operator(s) claims that a document is an official FBI document, when it is not, then they have falsely exercised the exclusive authority of the FBI to issue statements as the FBI, an agency of the United States. The available evidence meets the criteria highlighted above.
(This centers around the definition of the verb "forge"; to forge a document, you must falsely pretend to be acting with authority to produce that document, or else it wouldn't be forging.)
If the twitter account operator(s) was provided the document by someone else and was misled by the provider, then the operators did not falsely pretend to be FBI, and so the operators would be protected from prosecution. The operators would need to make this claim to the court; they do not appear to have done so at this time.
(Standard disclaimer applies. I am not your lawyer, I have not prepared citations for review, please seek legal counsel before taking any action based upon an HN comment.)
I think we should keep definitions of words consistent. Impersonation is not forgery or a dependency thereof. Those are different words for different terms.
People seriously need to get this pounded into their heads. Read the bill of rights. You do not have a right to free speech on private platforms.
Twitter is the equivalent of you arguing with me in my house. I can tell you to be quiet or I’ll kick you out of my house. You have no free speech rights in private spaces. Twitter is a private company. You have no free speech rights on their platform.
Rather, this is a better analog to shield laws, which can protect media from divulging sources in many cases.
There are two free speech arguments. Keep in mind that "free speech" is not relegated to the 1st Amendment and defenses of that generally lean on supplementary law.
1) The free speech of the user. Again, while it's true that it's not protected within a private entity, it's irrelevant because your protections are limited; in this case when your speech breaks another law.
2) The free speech of the platform. Being compelled to reveal this information really doesn't even touch any free speech argument except a vague interpretation of shield laws. DMCA as it exists provides legal protection against the crime, of course.
If so I have a tax return to sell you.
P.S. My cousin is a prince form Nigeria that might want to discuss a business opportunity with you let me know if you’re interested.
Is this really that hard? The Onion fakes documents all the time and claims to have quotes from police officers and government officials on a daily basis.
Free speech is the most essential of all freedoms, and you'd trade it away for a song and a dance out of sheer ignorance.
That said this isn't a criminal case and the state isn't prosecuting anyone. (Yet; I assume the person might be prosecuted at some point)
Free speech laws don't cover the distribution of child porn, for example. Are you saying that the government shouldn't restrict the distribution of child porn because it infringes on free speech?
You're arguing that whether a particular form of speech is illegal or not should have no weight on deciding whether or not to protect that form of speech? Are you really arguing that laws don't matter here? So straight up, do you believe that the government is infringing on people's rights by banning child porn, yes or no?
I don't know if they're arguing that, but I will argue that. Whether or not it is protected speech is a question you approach before you decide whether or not it is illegal.
For example, speech intended to cause someone to immediately assault you is not protected. It's not protected regardless of whether or not the government chooses to make it illegal, it can both not be protected speech, and still be legal. On the other hand arguing for a political position (with the goal of advancing the political position, not "arguing" a political position in an attempt to get someone to immediately punch you) is protected. It's protected regardless of whether or not congress passes a law forbidding it.
> So straight up, do you believe that the government is infringing on people's rights by banning child porn, yes or no?
This question misses the point, no, but I also wouldn't believe it was protected speech if the government had just not passed a law against it. Rather I would continue to believe that by virtue of it's lack of expressive nature and by virtue of how it harms people unable to consent that it is not protected speech.
All those are slightly different definitions, but I wasn't being precise enough in my previous comment that the differences are important.
Protected speech is any legal speech that additionally enjoys protection from the constitution, while unprotected speech would be legal speech that is not otherwise protected. And then you have illegal stuff that is outlawed.
Courts to my knowledge, even in american, don't consider the constitution at the lower levels, just local legislation, ie any legal speech is equivalent regardless of protected status.
Specific protection status would be regulated by precedent in higher courts which do have the capacity to interprete the constitution.
Courts at every level consider the constitution. Lower level courts routinely rule on constitutional grounds.
The legislature routinely passes unconstitutional laws that purport to punish constitutionally protected speech, and those laws are routinely not enforced against that speech. (Often these laws have other constitutionally valid purposes and are still enforced for those purposes, more rarely their main purpose is to forbid protected speech and they are thrown out entirely).
It is simply not the case in the us that the legislature passing a law against speech means that the speech is unprotected and illegal.
What you'd rather want to say is "they are thrown out in court".
>It is simply not the case in the us that the legislature passing a law against speech means that the speech is unprotected and illegal.
Until a court considers otherwise, it very much is. A law is valid until a court overthrows it. Hence it requires proper police (the executive) to enforce it. Otherwise the state will just not function.
Nothing. There are some aspects where US law is pretty well aligned with the principles of freedom of speech, and others where it isn't aligned at all. For example: A significant percentage of speech is carried out on social media, where US law does not require free speech to be enforced - but, according to the principles of freedom of expression, free speech is very valuable.
Also people tend to forget that freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences; limiting consequences of speech, even if it were desirable, can start restricting others' freedom of expression and association. If Bob gets on a stump and starts spewing controversial hate speech his employer is perfectly free to not want to associate with that behavior and fire him.
According to U.S. law some kinds of child pornography are legal. Do you believe, therefore, that it is against the principles of freedom of speech that the NZ government has banned them. Yes or no?
Do you have any evidence of this? I'm not aware that this is true at all and I don't believe it to be the case.
> Do you believe, therefore, that it is against the principles of freedom of speech that the NZ government has banned them. Yes or no?
No, I believe that freedom of speech comes with limitations and preventing distribution of child porn is a perfectly good limitation to put in place on freedom of speech.
Anyway, to make the point in a more straightforward way:
What ought and oughtn't be allowed expression according to the principles of freedom of speech is not a clear-cut thing. There are many different views on it, and to dismiss all those with views different from those who wrote US law is silly.
A. The kinds of expression protected under U.S. law
B. The kinds of expression which should be protected according to the principles of freedom of speech
The point is that, because A and B are separate things, the fact that impersonating an FBI officer is not protected under US law[1] does not entail that impersonating an FBI officer should not be protected according to the principles of freedom of speech.
[1]which may or may not be the case, I'm not a lawyer nor an American
As I recall it, people can and have been prosecuted for drawing and owning cartoons of child porn. That is a victimless crime - so yes it probably has gotten to the point where the government is infringing rights unreasonably. The government can walk in and created a loser in a situation where nobody was unhappy. It is the production of the porn that worries me rather than the possession. I'd be ok with the whole situation if everyone was sticking to one cache of obscene material produced 50 years ago and nobody new was being harmed.
But more to the topic at hand, CP isn't a free speech issue. The crime is, by and large, possession of child porn and so the issue is one of privacy rather than speech. They may as well legalise distribution, if anyone were stupid enough to do it publicly it would make it easy for the police to find everyone involved and prosecute them.
-RULES OF FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION-
1. Any person may say anything
Spouting falsehoods under a false pretense as an authority shouldn't be protected. Otherwise what's stopping society from drowning in a he-said she-said of conspiracy noise?
1. If the government is to restrict speech, then it must be granted the power to restrict speech
2. If the government is granted the power to restrict speech, then it may misuse this power in its own perceived interests
3. If the government misuses its power in this way then democracy will be threatened
4. Democracy is good
Conclusion: the government should not be allowed to restrict speech
I completely agree that it child porn exposes children to abuse and should be illegal, but it’s important to note how proponents of that medium argue for its legitimacy.
Distributing sexual images of someone without their consent is a clear crime against that person. Children can not consent.
This is what they always say. All of the exceptions get some reason why they don't count as free speech. Why can't this argument be used on both sides?
Are you really arguing there should never be any legs consequences for text/speech? If so, so many laws would no longer apply - fraud, harassment, false advertisement, perjury, racketeering... hell, you couldn't even convict someone of hiring a hit man to kill someone, because it was just words telling the guy to kill someone for money!
Fraud is a tort that involves several elements, with the ‘speech’ being merely one element.
Ditto with harassment.
To analogize, your comment is akin to the following:
Poster: We should have a right to use knives.
You: Murder by stabbing is not a right!
[edit] In short, you can lie all day long... it’s your right. It only becomes ‘fraud’ when (in most jurisdictions):
1. You make a misrepresentation,
2. About something material,
3. That you intended another to rely upon,
4. And which they did in fact rely upon,
5. And that reliance was reasonably justified,
6. And they suffered harm thereby,
7. And the harm was proximately caused by the statement.
If any element is missing, your free to engage in the conduct without interference by the govt.
Newspapers and Twitter users have no right to expect that anonymous statements made online or documents given to them for free are accurate or true. If they chose to publish defamatory articles based on their lack of due diligence, the civil liability rests with them.
This isn’t charging someone with lying in a tweet. This is someone who used twitter to contact people in order to commit a crime (or at least that is what is alleged in court)... they can use the law to attempt to find out who this user is.
I'll apologize if I have the details of the case wrong, but where is this supposed fraud? The only way I could see this being fraudulent is if (1) the private investigator being PAID for his investigatory services created the account and faked the document himself to continue getting paid for additional investigation or (2) the journalist being PAID for her journalistic work created fake documents so that she could publish them and accrue the financial benefits of authoring a juicy story.
But if whysprtech is anyone else on the planet—a conspiratorial kook, a troll, or even a political operative trying to embarass people—no fraud has been committed and there is no basis for unmasking him. The people responsible for the defamation aren't random anonymous internet trolls, but publishing companies who make money purporting to report the rigorously validated truth, but are actually lazy, naive, and gullible.
Your are confusing lying under oath with the crime of perjury.
The false statement, standing alone, is not actionable... it is merely one of several elements that make up the crime of perjury.
For example, 'right to a fair trial by a jury of their peers' means that judges and the rest of them must be organised, paid for, etc.
If you are willing to recognize that society has had an incorrect view of rights in the past, you must recognize that there is a standard beyond society to appeal to.
Unless you want to invoke divine will as that "standard beyond society," humanity and its arbitrary social constructs are all you have available to deal with, and some problems can't be reduced to objective and absolute terms as a result.
You could invoke "nature" but nature doesn't recognize rights. No creature has a natural right to food, safety or property. Nature engages in warfare, cruelty, violence, rape and slavery with abandon, and without even the pretext of morality. Even anarchists wouldn't want to live in a world governed entirely by natural law.
A slave will appeal to society because society has the power. But if the society does not listen to the appeals of the slave, we can still judge that the slave is correct and the society is wrong. And that judgement is not arbitrary.
The same grounds that we use to argue against slavery today. Just because the society around you doesn't believe certain rights are real doesn't mean you can't personally buy into them. "Rights are a societal construct" doesn't mean that nobody has a right to believe different things from society. It just means that our conception of rights derive from societal consensus, not a higher power or objective source, and conversely that there is no higher power or objective source we can invoke to override society's mores.
> If you are willing to recognize that society has had an incorrect view of rights in the past, you must recognize that there is a standard beyond society to appeal to.
No, you can just criticize them using the today's moral standards. You can be sufficiently committed to your moral standards to be willing to impose them on other people without simultaneously believing that those moral standards are a objective property of the natural universe.
Hume's is-ought guillotine is a thing. A normative statement does not magically become an positive fact just because that normative statement is an extremely strongly held (e.g. slavery is bad). The notion of inalienable rights is a rhetorical trick that lazily conflates the normative and the positive.
Unless society doesn't recognize your right to believe differently, no?
The is-ought problem does not rule out the existence of normative facts. It simply states that they can't be proven by positive facts. You seem to be trying to rule out the existence of normative facts by appealing to positive facts.
Having an opinion doesn't make that opinion an objective fact!
1) The Twitter user isn't charged with anything, so no one is trying to restrict their speech.
2) Anonymous speech isn't the same as free speech
3) This is a civil suit. Civil suits have always been able to compel the disclosure of some private information in some circumstances.
The potential for reprisal in expressing your choice or opinion in some circumstances is very high and anonymity is sometimes the only thing that can eliminate the chill of that risk. It is in this way a free speech issue.
On the other hand, if a crime or tort was committed, well that isn't considered free.
Interestingly, this has not always been the case. Elections in the US did not use anonymous voting until nearly the 20th century. And the reason for instituting the secret ballot was apparently less due to free speech concerns, and more because of rampant corruption and bribery to buy votes.
> On the other hand, if a crime or tort was committed, well that isn't considered free.
And this is a tort case
British elections aren’t anonymous - the ballot paper has a unique identifier and this is written beside the voter’s name on the polling station’s list when the ballot is issued by a polling clerk.
The list is sealed when the polling station closes, but can be opened by court order if the election result is challenged.
Ballot papers (votes) and their corresponding number lists (matching voter to ballot paper) are kept for 12 months before destruction, and together allow who voted for who to be known - however - it seems no-one is allowed to inspect this except for the purposes of prosecuting an electoral fraud, so votes are to all intents and purposes private.
Perhaps the top downvote was for pedantry (?), but there is a difference between anonymous and private. The British system could issue ballots without recording to which specific person - that would be anonymous. You’d lose the ability to ask a particular voter if their counted ballot was the one they marked (substitution fraud), but I don’t think this ever actually happens.
I didn't know larping was illegal
Not talking about Twitter here - the individual may not be American (America - the new Rome.)
It really doesn't matter where I am physically to break a law of a different country. Now whether my country is going to extradite me is a different question.
That is not a protected act and is prosecutable[0].
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/912