[drewcoo]

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?

[kube-system]

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.

[pokeymcsnatch]

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.

[kube-system]

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.

[pokeymcsnatch]

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.

[kube-system]

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.

[greyface-]

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