[mpyne]

So if I should find out someone is HIV positive and looking for employment, I should be able to type out the preceding sentence to the HR departments of all prospective employers due to my First Amendment rights?

How about inciting a lynch mob (you know, the kind that hang 'uppity' persons off of trees)? It's just speech, right?

[reginaldjcooper]

Inciting a lynch mob is conspiracy to commit murder, so it's not a restriction on free speech that would prevent you from doing so.

Telling everyone an applicant has HIV is disgustingly immoral but I don't know if/why you should be barred from doing it. That's a much better question than the lynch mob.

[mpyne]

> Inciting a lynch mob is conspiracy to commit murder, so it's not a restriction on free speech that would prevent you from doing so.

On the contrary! The inciter doesn't explicitly call for the killing, rather they froth the crowd up into a frenzy by lies and emotion and then ask what that crowd is going to do about it... right about the time that a convenient victim from the "oppressor group" (Jews/blacks/etc.) comes into the scene.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_excep...

[kevingadd]

Discrimination of that type in hiring contexts is illegal already, IIRC.

[beedogs]

Jesus. What do either of those situations have to do with this case? (Spoiler: nothing at all.)

[mpyne]

There's a cute Churchill quote about hiring a prostitute, that seems to apply here.

In short, the comment implied that the First Amendment has an absolute and total protection of speech as a way of saying my larger point is ridiculous.

But speech doesn't enjoy total protection, even in the U.S. And most people would identify some category of thing that they simply wouldn't let people say about another, whether it's stuff like personal and private IM/emails, information useful for identity theft, financial information, etc.

Almost everyone has something that they would say the First Amendment doesn't protect. So now the question people should ask themselves is what kind of other speech would they say warrants no protection? They've already agreed to prostitute their absolute protection of speech, now they need only negotiate on the 'cost'.

[kevingadd]

Neither of those actions are 'just speech', quite in fact they are punishable through the existing legal framework and in neither case is the crime specifically the speech. The crime is what you use the speech to do, whether it is oppress someone, punish them, or bring harm to them.

Pasting a link to the stratfor archive - content that was already available in lots of places - does not do measurable harm to anyone. The idiots at Stratfor who stored CC information without proper security, or the people who leaked that information without paying attention, are the ones who did harm. Once that information was out there on the internet, no single link was going to magnify or increase the magnitude of that disclosure.

[comex]

While this is a reasonable opinion, the parent was responding to a claim that "typing out http://some.website should never be a crime. Period." Since the harm supposedly caused by pasting the link is contested, this was presumably meant to mean that the consequences of typing out a link should not be considered, so the parent was reasonable in rebutting it with that example.

[kevingadd]

My PoV is that the link itself IS irrelevant; you can just look at whether it inflicted harm to the owners of those credit cards, and in this case it obviously did not - the information was already available.

[mpyne]

Yeah, that's one of the things that would make pasting a link just fine in my opinion/analysis, is if that data were already publically-known (and not otherwise legally restricted somehow). I'm not diving into 40 pages of indictments to research again, court PDFs are driving me batty, but to the extent that information was already out there somehow I don't see justification for charging Barrett for simply pointing that out.