Federal judge OKs prosecution of a man accused of posting anti-police rants on Facebook.

Federal judge OKs prosecution of man accused of posting anti-police rants on Facebook, saying that dismissing criminal charges on free speech grounds would be "inappropriate."

A federal judge has given the green light to the U.S. Justice Department's prosecution of an Indiana man who allegedly posted incendiary remarks about police. 

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge William Lawrence in Indiana rejected requests by the defendant, Matthew Michael, to throw out the charges on the grounds that no specific Drug Enforcement Administration agent or other individual had actually been named in the posts.

Lawrence ruled that -- assuming the Facebook postings were illegal threats, which has yet to be proved -- they "were directed at natural persons, namely DEA agents, law enforcement officers, and government personnel."

In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader on First Amendment grounds, ruling his vague promises of violence -- "there might have to be some revengeance taken" -- were not illegal.

Michael is accused of writing a series of posts in August 2011 (and creating a "statewide" Facebook event scheduled for November 2011) containing vague but angry and violent statements regarding DEA agents. One alleged post: "War is near..anarchy and justice will be sought...I'll kill whoever I deem to be in the way of harmony to the human race...BE WARNED IF U PULL ME OVER!!"

That's enough to allow the trial to proceed, Lawrence ruled in a written opinion saying:

The First Amendment does not insulate all speech from criminal consequence. Certain categories of speech having little or no social value are not protected, and threats are one such category.... It would be inappropriate for the court to enter a verdict of not guilty based solely on the face of the indictment unless the court could imagine no facts that would render Michael's posts unprotected. That is not the situation here.

Michael is facing three counts of transmitting threats in interstate commerce.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57531758-38/anti-dea-rants-on-facebook-spark-criminal-prosecution/
  
Woman arrested for spreading Facebook photos of undercover cop.

Mesquite, TX - A North Texas woman has been arrested after being accused of posting Facebook photos of an undercover policeman who testified against her friend in court.

Mesquite police arrested Melissa Walthall, 30, for allegedly posting the photo of the officer, who authorities say recently testified in a drug case against her friend. Her Facebook post identified the person as an undercover officer, according to a federal affidavit.

After a caller tipped off Mesquite police to Walthall's Facebook post about a week ago, an investigator found that it posed a "viable threat to that officer's safety," the affidavit said.

The Dallas Morning News reports that her friend, George Pickens, 34, was upset about the officer's testimony and found his photograph on Facebook while researching him online.

Her friend, Bobby Stedham, who found the original photo, then turned it into a flyer, which he intended to post in public identifying the officer as an undercover cop, was also arrested for retaliation.

Walthall was arrested for posting a photo she took of the poster.

But the real retaliation is coming from the Mesquite Police Department for arresting them on a baseless charge.

According to the statute, a person is guilty of retaliation when they commit an offense that “intentionally or knowingly harms or threatens to harm another by an unlawful act.”

The key word here is “unlawful.”

It will be hard to prove they acted unlawfully when they took a photo that was already posted on the cop’s Facebook page and outted him as an undercover cop.

Perhaps they can argue they are guilty of some type of copyright infringement but that is generally considered more of a civil violation instead of a criminal act.

And the victim would be the rightful owner of the photo, whomever snapped it, not the subject of the photo.

Police say they were retaliating against the officer for having testified against Stedham’s brother, George Pickens, whom the officer testified against in a drug case a couple of months earlier.
http://www.pixiq.com/article/texas-cops-arrest-pair-for-reposting-facebook-photo
 
http://www.wtsp.com/news/article/278363/81/Woman-arrested-for-spreading-Facebook-photos-of-undercover-cop 

How the Western world is limiting free speech.

Free speech is dying in the Western world. While most people still enjoy considerable freedom of expression, this right, once a near-absolute, has become less defined and less dependable for those espousing controversial social, political or religious views. The decline of free speech has come not from any single blow but rather from thousands of paper cuts of well-intentioned exceptions designed to maintain social harmony.

A willingness to confine free speech in the name of social pluralism can be seen at various levels of authority and government. In February, for instance, Pennsylvania Judge Mark Martin heard a case in which a Muslim man was charged with attacking an atheist marching in a Halloween parade as a “zombie Muhammed.” Martin castigated not the defendant but the victim, Ernie Perce, lecturing him that “our forefathers intended to use the First Amendment so we can speak with our mind, not to piss off other people and cultures — which is what you did.”

Of course, free speech is often precisely about pissing off other people — challenging social taboos or political values.

This was evident in recent days when courts in Washington and New York ruled that transit authorities could not prevent or delay the posting of a controversial ad that says: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.”

When U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer said the government could not bar the ad simply because it could upset some Metro riders, the ruling prompted calls for new limits on such speech. And in New York, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority responded by unanimously passing a new regulation banning any message that it considers likely to “incite” others or cause some “other immediate breach of the peace.”

Such efforts focus not on the right to speak but on the possible reaction to speech — a fundamental change in the treatment of free speech in the West. The much-misconstrued statement of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that free speech does not give you the right to shout fire in a crowded theater is now being used to curtail speech that might provoke a violence-prone minority. Our entire society is being treated as a crowded theater, and talking about whole subjects is now akin to shouting “fire!”

The new restrictions are forcing people to meet the demands of the lowest common denominator of accepted speech, usually using one of four rationales.

Speech is blasphemous:

Even the Obama administration supported the passage of a resolution in the U.N. Human Rights Council to create an international standard restricting some anti-religious speech (its full name: “Combating Intolerance, Negative Stereotyping and Stigmatization of, and Discrimination, Incitement to Violence and Violence Against, Persons Based on Religion or Belief”). Egypt’s U.N. ambassador heralded the resolution as exposing the “true nature” of free speech and recognizing that “freedom of expression has been sometimes misused” to insult religion. 

For more about this topic check out this (pdf.) Blasphemy Laws Exposed: The Consequences of Criminalizing “Defamation of Religions”

At a Washington conference last year to implement the resolution, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declared that it would protect both “the right to practice one’s religion freely and the right to express one’s opinion without fear.” But it isn’t clear how speech can be protected if the yardstick is how people react to speech — particularly in countries where people riot over a single cartoon. Clinton suggested that free speech resulting in “sectarian clashes” or “the destruction or the defacement or the vandalization of religious sites” was not, as she put it, “fair game.”

Given this initiative, President Obama’s U.N. address last month declaring America’s support for free speech, while laudable, seemed confused — even at odds with his administration’s efforts.
 
Speech is hateful:
 
In the United States, hate speech is presumably protected under the First Amendment. However, hate-crime laws often redefine hateful expression as a criminal act. Thus, in 2003, the Supreme Court addressed the conviction of a Virginia Ku Klux Klan member who burned a cross on private land. The court allowed for criminal penalties so long as the government could show that the act was “intended to intimidate” others. It was a distinction without meaning, since the state can simply cite the intimidating history of that symbol.
 
Speech is discriminatory:
 
Perhaps the most rapidly expanding limitation on speech is found in anti-discrimination laws. Many Western countries have extended such laws to public statements deemed insulting or derogatory to any group, race or gender.

Speech is deceitful:
 
In the United States, where speech is given the most protection among Western countries, there has been a recent effort to carve out a potentially large category to which the First Amendment would not apply. While we have always prosecuted people who lie to achieve financial or other benefits, some argue that the government can outlaw any lie, regardless of whether the liar secured any economic gain.

One such law was the Stolen Valor Act, signed by President George W. Bush in 2006, which made it a crime for people to lie about receiving military honors. The Supreme Court struck it down this year, but at least two liberal justices, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, proposed that such laws should have less of a burden to be upheld as constitutional. The House responded with new legislation that would criminalize lies told with the intent to obtain any undefined “tangible benefit.”

The dangers are obvious. Government officials have long labeled whistleblowers, reporters and critics as “liars” who distort their actions or words. If the government can define what is a lie, it can define what is the truth.

The very right that laid the foundation for Western civilization is increasingly viewed as a nuisance, if not a threat. Whether speech is deemed imflammatory or hateful or discriminatory or simply false, society is denying speech rights in the name of tolerance, enforcing mutual respect through categorical censorship.
As in a troubled marriage, the West seems to be falling out of love with free speech. Unable to divorce ourselves from this defining right, we take refuge instead in an awkward and forced silence
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-four-arguments-the-western-world-uses-to-limit-free-speech/2012/10/12/e0573bd4-116d-11e2-a16b-2c110031514a_print.html