[mmmooo]

Anyone care to guesstimate how many assassination plots could have been prevented if just read the assailants public twitter feed in which he or she outlined, in plain english, his/her intentions to perform said act?

Somehow I feel like the people that are serious about this level of criminal activity, and capable of actually accomplishing it, aren't first announcing their intentions on twitter.

[burkaman]

I'm not sure about that. People who actually want to assassinate the president are not criminal geniuses, or even rational people at all. They're often mentally ill, or at least stupid enough to think that killing the president is a good idea and they can get away with it.

More than one mass murderer has talked publicly about what they're planning online. And two guys that planned to assassinate Obama in 2008 were caught because they bragged to a friend about what they were doing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_assassination_plot...

Obviously you won't catch everybody, but I don't think the idea of getting tipped off about a potential assassination plan based on posts online is totally far fetched.

[VLM]

Thought experiment:

As a culture we've been pretty effective lately at electing miserable disappointing failures to public office. This seems a relatively uncontroversial observation, and note I'm careful not to name any names so as to not appear biased toward one side or the other of the one coin we've been dealt.

Precondition 2 is everyone has social media accounts where they say stuff no one cares about, constantly. The CB radio of this decade.

Precondition 3 is anyone planning an assassination is smart enough to self censor and say nothing about the entire topic.

Given the above preconditions, the only rational conclusion is 99.9% of the population will continually be whining and complaining, and you can focus your attentions on the 0.1% who are at least considering doing something bad enough to self censor.

So the thought experiment is Obama comes to visit a city and the guy who gets a SS visit is the only guy in the whole city who's not rambling on in social media about "Kenya" or "Can't believe I wasted my vote on him" or writing racial slurs or "he broke every campaign promise" or whatever.

[cstross]

Disagree. As a culture we have developed public offices that are structured to prevent anyone who might be elected with a mandate to effect change from doing so. The iron law of bureaucracy applies: after the first generation most of the staff of any organization see their job not as pursuing the mission statement of the org but as preserving their own jobs. Attempts to change things generate resistance from within because, hey, jobs might be threatened. Hell, political candidates who might challenge their party's ability to win future elections by accomplishing change (which might be unwelcome to some elements of the voting -- or election-buying -- public or oligaarchs) are weeded out before they get a chance to run for office.

The "disappointing" incumbent is merely a printed-paper face on the front of a machine. Which some loons choose to use for target practice. Resulting in the existence of a vast reactionary bureaucracy dedicated to extirpating threats to printed-paper faces.

[michaelt]

  Somehow I feel like the people that are serious about this
  level of criminal activity, and capable of actually 
  accomplishing it, aren't first announcing their intentions 
  on twitter.

If you're in the secret service and you let the president get assassinated, it would be much more embarrassing if the assassin had announced their intentions in public.

Once the assassin has been identified, if they had a tweet from a month ago saying "I am going to assassinate the president in a month" you can bet that will be on the front page of every newspaper, making you look like an idiot.

And if your anti-embarrassment system should prevent a real assassination, so much the better.

[mmmooo]

Though I completely agree with the intention of your point, the same sort of logic can be used to justify all sorts of dubious "three letter" activity.

By that same logic, are you still an idiot if instead of a tweet, it was a facebook public post? How about a facebook post marked only visible to your friends? Or in an email to your brother's wife's third cousin?

I'm not a big fan of slippery slopes, but this one looks a bit lubricated.