Extra Credit #85 – Online Threat to Kill Obama Leads to Arrest.
We are living in a society where we all have freedom of speech due to United State Constitution amendments. With the freedom of speech we tend to write whatever we want to write anywhere we want to such as public spaces and online social network. But what we write can sometimes cause problem.
A 47 year old man name Walter Edward Bagdasarian from South California was charged on January 9, 2009 for threatening to kill President Obama while he was running for candidate. Bagdasarian had six weapons with him such as three handguns and three rifles. He was released with $100,000 real estate bond because it was not accused of actually attempting to kill President Obama. Bagdasarian was caught due to his racist post on Yahoo Finance board on October 22 about Obama. Secret Service agents have traced IP address of post that Bagdasarian wrote.
Walter Edward Bagdasarian wrote this racist post toward Obama without thinking about the consequences it will bring to him. Even though we think the amendment is protecting us, I believe there is a limit to the protection. Once you go over the limit, whatever you have said and wrote will eventually bring result you won’t be happy about like Bagdasarian did. We also think we have privacy to whatever we write in private place on internet. The truth is that there is no one who have privacy online. What you write on private space online can be viewed and can trace you down with IP address, which is like a address to your computer.
We have to watch out what we say or write on public and private spaces because the protection that you get from the amendment have limit. There is no such thing as privacy in the space called “the Internet.”
-MinJung Choi
mediawise 