[mqzaidi]

Thinking out loud and trying to extrapolate, but how is this different from a thought crime? If tomorrow tech progresses to a point when people's crazy thoughts could be read, would it be justified taking pre-emptive action like this.

[rayiner]

> but how is this different from a thought crime

He didn't just think "I'm going to shoot up the school." He said it in a setting where lots of people saw it, and it scared a woman who took him seriously. I think its a stupid prosecution, but there is a big difference between a "thought crime" and acting on what someone wrote that was visible to many other people.

The problem here is the impedance mismatch between what people think of Facebook as and what it really is. A comment on a wall post isn't some private aside between you and your friend. It's a public statement to 200+ other people who can see your posts. The closest analogue is probably posting something on the cork board at your school or office. Would you write "I'm going to shoot up the school! j/k" on the push board at your school?

[tptacek]

The problem in the Facebook case is that many of us know what online game chats look like, and know that most of the people on those chats are 13-17 years old, and can't stomach the idea of some spastic Texan being able to get a kid thrown into juvenile detention for saying something dumb.

There is a general theme in people's misunderstanding of how the law works/should work relating to how easy technology makes it to break laws. A lot of the time, the problem really is with technology; if technology makes it easy for someone to shut down the power grid because they get mad at something someone else says on IRC, that's not the law's problem; knowingly shutting people's power off should be a felony no matter what. Tech might have made it easier to do, but the mens rea is the same.

But it's hard to make that argument in this case. Saying unbelievably stupid shit is an inalienable right of teenagers; [insert snarky comment about HN threads here]. It's hard to make a crime out something where no mens was even involved, let alone mens rea.

[rayiner]

You're right, there is no mens rea, and that's why I think prosecuting the kid is massively stupid as well as wrong. But I just don't think it's a "thought crime." He didn't just have this thought, or say it in private, or even make a private aside to a friend. He posted it on Facebook where some uptight lady in Canada read it.

It's really easy to forget in Facebook, especially commenting on peoples' wall posts, that what you're doing is putting a statement in writing readable by potentially hundreds of people, not making a private comment directly to your friend. If he had said it to his friend in the lady's presence, and got prosecuted for that, it still would have been wrong to prosecute him, but I don't think anybody would be calling it a "thought crime."