Category Archives: The Denise Simon Experience

Chemical Weapons Still in Syria

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‘The road to Damascus is a road to peace.” Those were damning words. When Nancy Pelosi embraced Bashar al-Assad in April 2007, she wasn’t simply challenging the commander-in-chief during a war; she was propagandizing for a dictator who was killing Americans.

Years later, Syria is a failed nation with millions that have fled their home country and chemical weapons by the order of Bashir al Assad kills thousands of those remaining in the country.

Barack Obama and John Kerry made impassioned speeches about taking on Syria after the use of chemical weapons crossed the ‘red-line’ imposed by the president.

In typical style, the red-line threat fell flat and was deferred to Russia to handle. Announcements were made that the process was complete and Assad complied to the disposals, well….not so much.

Mission to Purge Syria of Chemical Weapons Comes Up Short

WSJ: Key excerpts
International inspectors rid nation of many arms, but Assad didn’t give up everything

In May of last year, a small team of international weapons inspectors gained entry to one of Syria’s most closely guarded laboratories. Western nations had long suspected that the Damascus facility was being used to develop chemical weapons.

Inside, Syrian scientists showed them rooms with test tubes, Bunsen burners and desktop computers, according to inspectors. The Syrians gave a PowerPoint presentation detailing the medical and agricultural research they said went on there. A Syrian general insisted that the Assad regime had nothing to hide.

As the international inspectors suspected back then, it was a ruse, part of a chain of misrepresentations by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime to hide the extent of its chemical-weapons work. One year after the West celebrated the removal of Syria’s arsenal as a foreign-policy success, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the regime didn’t give up all of the chemical weapons it was supposed to.

An examination of last year’s international effort to rid Syria of chemical weapons, based on interviews with many of the inspectors and U.S. and European officials who were involved, shows the extent to which the Syrian regime controlled where inspectors went, what they saw and, in turn, what they accomplished. That happened in large part because of the ground rules under which the inspectors were allowed into the country, according to the inspectors and officials.

The West was unable, for example, to prevent Mr. Assad from continuing to operate weapons-research facilities, including the one in Damascus visited by inspectors, making it easier for the regime to develop a new type of chemical munition using chlorine. And the regime never had to account for the types of short-range rockets that United Nations investigators believe were used in an Aug. 21, 2013, sarin gas attack that killed some 1,400 people, these officials say.

Obama administration officials have voiced alarm this year about reports that Mr. Assad is using the chlorine weapons on his own people. And U.S. intelligence now suggests he hid caches of even deadlier nerve agents, and that he may be prepared to use them if government strongholds are threatened by Islamist fighters, according to officials familiar with the intelligence. If the regime collapses outright, such chemical-weapons could fall into the hands of Islamic State, or another terror group.

“Nobody should be surprised that the regime is cheating,” says Robert Ford, former U.S. ambassador to Syria under President Barack Obama. He says more intrusive inspections are needed.

The White House and State Department say last year’s mission was a success even if the regime hid some deadly chemicals. Western nations removed 1,300 metric tons of weapons-grade chemicals, including ingredients for nerve agents sarin and VX, and destroyed production and mixing equipment and munitions. U.S. officials say the security situation would be far more dangerous today if those chemicals hadn’t been removed, especially given recent battlefield gains by Islamists. Demanding greater access and fuller disclosures by the regime, they say, might have meant getting no cooperation at all, jeopardizing the entire removal effort.

“I take no satisfaction from the fact that the chlorine bombs only kill a handful at a time instead of thousands at a time,” says Thomas Countryman, the assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation. “But it is important to keep a perspective that the most dangerous of these inhumane weapons are no longer in the hands of this dictator.”

The following account of the inspectors’ efforts on the ground is based on interviews with people who were involved. Syrian officials in New York and Damascus didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.

Inspectors from The Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, together with U.N. personnel, arrived in Damascus in October 2013 to an especially difficult work environment. They were in a war zone, and rebel forces viewed them with hostility because the inspection process forestalled U.S. airstrikes, which the rebels were counting on to weaken the Assad regime.

Suspected gaps
The new team flew into Damascus once a month to meet with Gen. Sharif and Syria’s leading scientists. As inspectors pressed the Syrians about suspected gaps in their initial weapons declaration, new details about the program began to emerge.
U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies had long suspected that there were research facilities in Damascus run by the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, or SSRC. In a bombing run in early 2013, Israeli warplanes had struck a convoy of trucks next to one of them. Israel believed the trucks were carrying weapons for Hezbollah.


At first, the Syrians told the new team they had no research facilities at all because they had developed their weapons in the field using what they described as “pop-up” labs. The inspectors had seen intelligence that suggested otherwise.
During an informal dinner in April 2014, inspectors half-jokingly suggested that the Syrians should allow them to visit an SSRC facility.
“If you are so interested, why don’t you just come along?” a Syrian official responded, according to Mr. Smith.

One Saturday the following month, the inspectors’ motorcade entered one of the SSRC compounds in Damascus. The facility’s director told the inspectors that no chemical weapons had been developed there. The facility had done research on detecting chemical agents and on treating people exposed to toxins, he said.
Gen. Sharif attended the presentation, which included an Arabic-language PowerPoint. The slides explained the SSRC’s work in areas including oncology and pesticides. The skeptical inspectors urged the Syrians to come clean about all their research and development facilities.
Last October, the Syrian regime added several research facilities to its official declaration of chemical-weapons sites, including the one in Damascus visited by inspectors that May. That gave inspectors the right to visit them for examinations. Western officials say samples taken by inspectors at the sites found traces of sarin and VX, which they say confirms that they had been part of the chemical-weapons program.


Earlier this year, American intelligence agencies tracked the regime’s increasing use of chlorine-filled bombs. The weapons-removal deal didn’t curtail the work of Syria’s weapons scientists, allowing the regime to develop more effective chlorine bombs, say U.S. officials briefed on the intelligence. The regime denies using chlorine.
The CIA had been confident that Mr. Assad destroyed all of the chemical weapons it thought he possessed when the weapons-removal deal was struck. In recent weeks, the CIA concluded that the intelligence picture had changed and that there was a growing body of evidence Mr. Assad kept caches of banned chemicals, according to U.S. officials.
Inspectors and U.S. officials say recent battlefield gains by Islamic State militants and rival al Qaeda-linked fighters have made it even more urgent to determine what Syria held back from last year’s mass disposal, and where it might be hidden. A new intelligence assessment says Mr. Assad may be poised to use his secret chemical reserves to defend regime strongholds. Another danger is that he could lose control of the chemicals, or give them to Hezbollah.
The team that visited the SSRC facility in Damascus recently asked the regime for information about unaccounted for munitions. Officials say there has been no response from Damascus.
“Accountability?” asks Mr. Cairns, the inspector. “At this point in time, it hasn’t happened.” Full story is here.

Hillary’s Team Denies Classified Emails

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As the probe continues on Hillary Clinton’s email history and her private server, one must question how a Secretary of State in four years never electronically interacted in classified communications.

If this is accurate when it comes to her private email server, then where did classified communications occur?

Hillary was a lawyer and so is Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and he too used a private email for official business and did the former Secretary of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, who also created an alias.

Clearly there is a real pattern in the Obama administration where abuse and waivers are the culture of corruption and obstruction of procedures and law. Imagine how many others use non official communications systems.

Criminal Inquiry Is Sought in Clinton Email Account

NYT’s

WASHINGTON — Two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of state, senior government officials said Thursday.

The request follows an assessment in a June 29 memo by the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence agencies that Mrs. Clinton’s private account contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.” The memo was written to Patrick F. Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management.

It is not clear if any of the information in the emails was marked as classified by the State Department when Mrs. Clinton sent or received them.

But since her use of a private email account for official State Department business was revealed in March, she has repeatedly said that she had no classified information on the account.

The Justice Department has not decided if it will open an investigation, senior officials said. A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign declined to comment.

At issue are thousands of pages of State Department emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private account. Mrs. Clinton has said she used the account because it was more convenient, but it also shielded her correspondence from congressional and Freedom of Information Act requests.

She faced sharp criticism after her use of the account became public, and subsequently said she would ask the State Department to release her emails.

The department is now reviewing some 55,000 pages of emails. A first batch of 3,000 pages was made public on June 30.

In the course of the email review, State Department officials determined that some information in the messages should be retroactively classified. In the 3,000 pages that were released, for example, portions of two dozen emails were redacted because they were upgraded to “classified status.” But none of those were marked as classified at the time Mrs. Clinton handled them.

In a second memo to Mr. Kennedy, sent on July 17, the inspectors general said that at least one email made public by the State Department contained classified information. The inspectors general did not identify the email or reveal its substance.

The memos were provided to The New York Times by a senior government official.

The inspectors general also criticized the State Department for its handling of sensitive information, particularly its reliance on retired senior Foreign Service officers to decide if information should be classified, and for not consulting with the intelligence agencies about its determinations.

In March, Mrs. Clinton insisted that she was careful in her handling of information on her private account. “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” she said. “There is no classified material. So I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.”

In May, the F.B.I. asked the State Department to classify a section of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that related to suspects who may have been arrested in connection with the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. The information was not classified at the time Mrs. Clinton received it.

The revelations about how Mrs. Clinton handled her email have been an embarrassment for the State Department, which has been repeatedly criticized over its handling of documents related to Mrs. Clinton and her advisers.

On Monday, a federal judge sharply questioned State Department lawyers at a hearing in Washington about why they had not responded to Freedom of Information Act requests from The Associated Press, some of which were four years old.

“I want to find out what’s been going on over there — I should say, what’s not been going on over there,” said Judge Richard J. Leon of United States District Court, according to a transcript obtained by Politico. The judge said that “for reasons known only to itself,” the State Department “has been, to say the least, recalcitrant in responding.”

Two days later, lawmakers on the Republican-led House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks said they planned to summon Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff to Capitol Hill to answer questions about why the department has not produced documents that the panel subpoenaed. That hearing is set for next Wednesday.

“The State Department has used every excuse to avoid complying with fundamental requests for documents,” said the chairman of the House committee, Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina.

Mr. Gowdy said that while the committee has used an array of measures to try to get the State Department to hand over documents, the results have been the same. “Our committee is not in possession of all documents needed to do the work assigned to us,” he said.

The State Department has sought to delay the hearing, citing continuing efforts to brief members of Congress on the details of the nuclear accord with Iran. It is not clear why the State Department has struggled with the classification issues and document production. Republicans have said the department is trying to use those processes to protect Mrs. Clinton.

State Department officials say they simply do not have the resources or infrastructure to properly comply with all the requests. Since March, requests for documents have significantly increased.

Some State Department officials said they believe that many senior officials did not initially take the House committee seriously, which slowed document production and created an appearance of stonewalling.

State Department officials also said that Mr. Kerry is concerned about the toll the criticism has had on the department and has urged his deputies to comply with the requests quickly.

Wheels up on the Crowded Obama Plane to Kenya

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On Africa trip, Air Force One will be crowded for once

WaPo:

Twenty House and Senate members will accompany President Obama on this week’s trip to Africa, according to White House officials, the latest sign of the White House’s effort to build a closer rapport with Congress.

The group — which includes 19 Democrats and one Republican, Sen. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) — will be evenly divided between the outbound and return flight. Flake and two of his colleagues on the Senate Foreign Affairs subcommittee on African affairs, Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), will join seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus on Thursday night’s flight to Nairobi. The Democratic House members include Karen Bass (Calif.), G.K. Butterfield (N.C.), Eddie Bernice Johnson (Tex.), Barbara Lee (Calif.), Gregory Meeks (N.Y.), Charles B. Rangel (N.Y.) and Terri Sewell (Ala.)

[READ: Why Sen. Jeff Flake is the one Republican journeying to Africa with Obama]

On the return flight from Ethiopia, the president will host 10 CBC members: Democratic Reps. Emanuel Cleaver (Mo.), John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), Marcia Fudge (Ohio), Al Green (Tex.), Sheila Jackson Lee (Tex.), Robin Kelly (Ill.), Gwen Moore (Wis.), Donald Payne (N.J.), Cedric Richmond (La.) and Bennie Thompson (Miss.).

Asked Wednesday about why the president was bringing along such a large congressional contingent to Kenya and Ethiopia, his national security adviser Susan Rice told reporters, “Well, obviously we want to strengthen and sustain what I’ve referred to repeatedly as a strong bipartisan consensus around support for Africa, Africa’s development, peace and security there.”

Rice added that last month the administration was focused on renewing the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade bill that received overwhelming support in the House and Senate. “But obviously we have many, many issues that are important that we need Congress’s support on — legislation that will support and codify some of the most significant initiatives, including in the health and agriculture and power sectors, as well as we have a nominee on the Hill that very much needs to be confirmed for USAID administrator,” she said.

***     

He will become the first sitting president to be hosted by Kenya or Ethiopia, his second stop on a four-day trip beginning on Friday.

Though the visit aims to boost US security and economic ties, many Kenyans view his arrival as a native son’s homecoming.

Mr Obama will spend private time with family members, say White House officials.

But his itinerary does not include travel to the village of Kogelo where his father is buried, despite a local witchdoctor’s predictions otherwise.

Mr Obama last visited Kenya – an important US ally against Somali Islamist group al Shabaab – while serving as a US senator in 2006.

In the Kenyan capital Nairobi, he will preside over the Global Entrepreneurship Summit and pay tribute to the victims and survivors of the 1998 US embassy bombing.

He will also dine with President Uhuru Kenyatta, who was indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Those charges were dropped in March, but the case prevented Mr Obama from going to Kenya.

Mr Obama will also give a speech to the Kenyan people in Nairobi.

Valerie Jarrett, an Obama aide, said: “Just as anybody is curious about their heritage, visiting Kenya provides him an opportunity to make that personal connection.”

The Kenyan authorities have filled potholes, repaired pavements and planted greenery along the route where the presidential motorcade will pass.

Street vendors’ stalls are creaking with Obama memorabilia such as T-shirts, portraits and DVDs.

In the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa he will become the first US president to address the African Union.

Activists have raised concerns in a letter to Mr Obama about his trip to East Africa because of alleged human rights violations.

US National Security Adviser Susan Rice said the US President wouldn’t hesitate to raise human rights concerns during the trip.

Mr Obama has chided African countries over gay rights, but Mr Kenyatta says it is a “non-issue” that won’t be on the agenda for the visit.

Mr Obama’s critics say he has done less for Africa than his predecessor, George W Bush, whose Aids relief programme made him a hero on the continent.

But Mr Obama’s advisers point to his own initiatives on electricity, agriculture and trade.

The US President wrote about his Kenyan roots in his best-selling 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father.

Debunked “birther” conspiracy theories once held he was actually born there, and ineligible to be US President.

Mr Obama will spend private time with family members, say White House officials, per Sky News

 

But his itinerary does not include travel to the village of Kogelo where his father is buried, despite a local witchdoctor’s predictions otherwise.

Mr Obama last visited Kenya – an important US ally against Somali Islamist group al Shabaab – while serving as a US senator in 2006.

In the Kenyan capital Nairobi, he will preside over the Global Entrepreneurship Summit and pay tribute to the victims and survivors of the 1998 US embassy bombing.

He will also dine with President Uhuru Kenyatta, who was indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Those charges were dropped in March, but the case prevented Mr Obama from going to Kenya.

Mr Obama will also give a speech to the Kenyan people in Nairobi.

 

What the Hell is the Army Thinking? Bergdahl Picked up at Pot Farm

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OMG, this man, a deserter got a pass from the Army to go to Mendocino County, California and well there was a raid. Then the Army, yes the Army sent a plane to go get him. WHAT???

US Army confirms to @FoxNews that Bowe Bergdahl was up in Mendocino County at Pot Farm, released back to his command at Fort Sam Houston. 8:10 PM, EST July 23, 2015

Fresh details here.

From NBC, Bay Area:

Bowe Bergdahl — the once-missing U.S. soldier in Afghanistan who was accused of desertion — was spotted hanging out at a Mendocino County marijuana farm during a raid.
According to the The Anderson Valley Advertiser, Bergdahl was an “unexpected visitor” in Mendocino County, where he was visiting old friends when the “local dope team arrived on a marijuana raid.”
Bergdahl arrived Friday at the farm, which is located in a remote part of Redwood Valley.
Bergdahl, who is awaiting military court martial, had an Army pass allowing him to be in Mendocino County, the Advertiser reported, adding he was “not connected to the dope grow in any way.”
The Mendocino Sheriff Department confirmed the report to NBC Bay Area, stressing Bergdahl was not arrested during the raid.
However, the Advertiser reported that military officials were notified and, after “calls all the way up to the Pentagon,” Bergdahl was escorted by military personnel sent to Ukiah. The sheriff told the Advertiser that Bergdahl was “above politeness” and even produced his military ID when people from the house he was visiting were being arrested.
The Sheriff’s Department was able to confirm that Bergdahl was on authorized leave to visit his friends and was not involved with the production of marijuana.
At the request of the Pentagon, Bergdahl was transported to Santa Rosa by the sheriff’s department. An Army major was expected to take him to his duty station near Washington.

As a side note, when Bergdahl as picked up from the Haqqani network, he was stoned then as well.

Secret Service On the Anti-Govt Crowd on the Internet

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The Secret Agents Who Stake Out the Ugliest Corners of the Internet

From the Atlantic:

Josephine Wolff

 

A team tasked with protecting the president of the United States is constantly sifting through hateful online comments to find would-be assassins or terrorists.

When President Obama launched his Twitter account in May, people noticed his rapid accumulation of followers, a silly back-and-forth with President Clinton, but also something more serious: the number of hostile and threatening messages directed at the president.

Sifting through those messages to determine which, if any, need to be taken seriously is the responsibility of the Secret Service Internet Threat Desk, a group of agents tasked with identifying and assessing online threats to the president and his family. The first part of this mission—finding threats—is in many ways made easier by the Internet: all you have to do is search! Pulling up every tweet which uses the words “Obama” and “assassinate” takes mere seconds, and the Secret Service has tried to make it easier for people to draw threats to its attention by setting up its own Twitter handle, @secretservice, for users to report threatening messages to.

But if the Internet makes it easier to find threats directed at the president, it can also make it harder to figure out which ones should be taken seriously. The sheer volume of threatening messages online, the lack of context, and the ease with which users can shield their identities all contribute to the challenges of assessing online threats. One series of tweets addressed to @POTUS that caught the Secret Service’s attention—at least enough to warrant an in-person visit from an agent—came from a user with the handle @jeffgully49 and included a picture showing a doctored version of the president’s campaign posters with his head in a noose and the word “HOPE” changed to “ROPE.” The messages were apparently posted by Jeff Gullickson of Plymouth, Minnesota, who was later visited at his home by a Secret Service agent. “The agent from the secret service was cordial,” Gullickson wrote in an email to MPR News, adding that the agent just wanted to be sure his tweets were not serious threats.

Making sure that Gullickson was not a threat required more than just an analysis of his online comments—it called for offline contact, an in-person visit, an assessment of who he was and what he was like face-to-face, not just on the Internet. Context is crucial for evaluating the seriousness of threats—both digital and analog—but online threats offer a slightly different set of contextual clues than their offline counterparts. And while much of the hate-filled commentary on the Internet is routinely written off as hyperbole and ranting, threats directed at the president are not so easily dismissed. So, every day, the Secret Service Internet Threat Desk is faced with the unenviable task of taking seriously some of the most extreme online rhetoric and trying to identify potential assassins or terrorists in the deluge of venomous messages directed at the president and his family.

Though most of the public cases involving the Internet threat desk have to do with threats made via Twitter or Facebook, the desk actually predates both platforms. Founded in 2000, the desk was reportedly expanded in 2009 around the same time that threats against President Obama spiked in the early months of his first term. Ronald Kessler, author of In the President’s Secret Service, said that when he visited the Internet threat desk several years ago it was “just a small room with a few people,” but added, “I’m sure it’s much bigger now.” Secret Service spokesman Robert Hoback declined to comment.

Since the Internet threat desk’s founding, Kessler said, more of the threats the Secret Service assesses have originated online, but the overall number of threats directed at the first family that require investigation has stayed relatively steady at about 10 per day—except for the period when Obama was first elected, when the Secret Service had to follow up on roughly 50 threats per day. “That includes threats on Twitter,” Kessler said. “It makes no difference to [the Secret Service] how a threat is communicated,” he added. “They can’t take that chance of assuming that because it’s on Twitter it’s less serious.”

The Secret Service categorizes all threats, online and offline alike, into one of three categories, according to Kessler. Class 3 threats are considered the most serious, and require agents to interview the individual who issued the threat and any acquaintances to determine whether that person really has the capability to carry out the threat. Class 2 threats are considered to be serious but issued by people incapable of actually follow up on their intentions, either because they are in jail or located at a great distance from the president. And Class 1 threats are those that may seem serious at first, but are determined not to be.

Classifying threats into these categories is partly a matter of wording and specificity—whether the speaker has developed a detailed plan, whether they state that they will kill the president or just that someone should kill the president—but also depends largely on the background of the people who issue them. “The Secret Service looks at whether this person has expressed similar plans previously, whether this person has a criminal record, or is mentally ill,” Kessler said. Presumably, that’s why an agent showed up at Gullickson’s house—to assess the person who issued the Twitter threat, not just the threat itself.

At a 2011 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, then-Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan emphasized the importance of identifying the people who threaten the president for Secret Service investigations. “When I was a new agent, a lot of times if you got a threat, it would come in the mail, and if the person who was making the threat was very courteous, they would put their return address on there. You would know who to go out and talk to,” Sullivan said. “But regardless of whether it is by mail or over the internet, our people are extremely aggressive with [figuring out who issued threats] … when we do identify that individual who has made that threat or that inappropriate interest that they are displaying, whether it is 2 o’clock in the morning or 2 o’clock in the afternoon, our people are out there looking for that individual to interview them.”

But the Secret Service can’t very well interview everyone who directs hostile comments at the president online—there are just too many of them—especially as the government’s embrace of social media platforms creates an increasing number of channels for lashing out at the president. “What you’ve done with the POTUS Twitter account is created a one-stop shopping for people who don’t like the president to blow off steam and convey their view that they don’t like the president,” said University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron. “That could perfectly well be political protest: ‘I hate you and I want to throw you in the river’ could mean ‘I hate your ideas and want to throw them in the river,’ or it could mean ‘I’m a neo-Nazi and I want to kill you because you’re a black president.’ For the president, [the Secret Service] is going to err on the side of over-inclusion and more false positives.”

Paring down those false positives may be even more of a challenge online than off. The Internet threat desk “comb[s] the internet” and has people “working 24 hours a day just going through the Internet looking for any type of buzzwords or any type of threatening or inappropriate activity out there that we may see that involves any of our protectees,” Sullivan said at the 2011 hearing.

In other words, the Secret Service is actively seeking out threats made online, rather than waiting for others to report them, or for the people issuing threats to contact the White House directly. “Online threats are much more findable—I can set up some structured queries and find out who’s making threats in real time,” said Andy Sellars, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “You can essentially have a column on TweetDeck for every time someone says ‘president’ and ‘kill’ in the same tweet. A lot of tools being sold to law enforcement are basically just glorified versions of TweetDeck.”

Finding the threats is the easy part, though. “It’s a lot easier to figure out the context of speech in the physical world than in the online world,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “You need that context in order to see what that speech really means.”

The cases that the Secret Service has pursued in recent years offer some clues as to which types of threats they seem to take most seriously. Repeat offenders, unsurprisingly, seem to come in for particular attention. For instance, Jarvis Britton of Birmingham, Alabama, was arrested and sentenced to a year in prison in 2013 after posting a series of tweets over the course of several months. In a 2012 affidavit, Secret Service Special Agent Phillip Holly described the series of events that led up to Britton’s arrest, beginning with two tweets on June 28, 2012, that read: “Free speech? Really? Let’s test this! Let’s kill the president!” and “I’m going to finish this, if they get me, they get me! #ohwell. I think we could get the president with cyanide. #MakeItSlow.” The next day, Britton tweeted “Barack Obama, I wish you were DEAD!”

Following the June tweets, the Secret Service spoke with Britton and advised him of “the seriousness of the matter,” according to Holly, but “no further action was taken” until Britton resumed tweeting threats several months later. On September 14, 2012, he posted the message “Let’s kill the president. F.E.A.R.” After learning of the September threats from the Internet Threat Desk, Holly concludes: “Based upon the foregoing, I have probable cause to believe that Jarvis M. Britton did knowingly and willfully threaten to take the life of, kidnap, or inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States.”

Donte Jamar Sims of Charlotte, North Carolina, was also sentenced in 2013 to serve jail time for a series of threatening tweets directed at the president. Sims’ tweets, posted during the 2012 Democratic National Convention, included the messages: “Ima Assassinate president Obama this evening!” and “The Secret Service is gonna be defenseless once I aim the Assault Rifle at Barack’s Forehead.”

The Internet Threat Desk’s investigations are not limited to Twitter. One 2012 investigation centered on a Facebook photo of several young men from Arizona posing with guns and a T-shirt with the president’s face on it riddled with bullet holes. A 2008 case focused on a series of pseudonymous comments made by the user californiaradial on the Yahoo Finance website, including “Shoot the nig. Country fkd for another 4 years+, what nig has done ANYTHING right???? Long term???? Never in history, except sambos.” And “Fk the niggar, he will have a 50 cal in the head soon.” In court documents, Special Agent Gregory Becker identified californiaradial as Walter Edward Bagdasarian after the Internet Threat Desk “obtained the IP address from which the messages had been sent, as well as the subscriber information for that account.”

When people who issue online threats are identified, they sometimes try to provide context for those threats that might excuse their behavior. Sims, for instance, claimed he was high on marijuana when he threatened the president. Britton’s lawyer similarly insisted his client had no intentions to actually harm the president. Other times, the real world context of online threats makes them seems more concerning—when the Secret Service searched Bagdasarian’s house, they found a .50 caliber rifle among his possessions, which appeared to lend credence to the prediction “he will have a 50 cal in the head soon.”

Ultimately, however, it is the content of the threat itself—not the context—that seems to matter most in court. Sims, Britton, and Bagdasarian all allegedly issued multiple violent threats at the president in online forums. But Sims and Britton were sent to jail, regardless of the claims both made about their respective mental states when they issued the threats—while Bagdasarian’s conviction was ultimately reversed by a federal appeals court in California because he had not specifically said that he himself would kill the president but, rather, suggested more generally that someone should do so.

Making these distinctions between the people who really intended harm—the people who, in legal language, issued threats that they should have reasonably foreseen would be interpreted as “serious expressions of intent to inflict bodily harm upon that person”—and the people who were merely venting political frustrations or indulging in some hyperbolic anger is a very murky area of law, particularly when it comes to online threats. “It is harder to separate the wheat from the chaff online,” said Fakhoury, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, of distinguishing “true threats” from speech that is protected by the First Amendment. “Part of that is the speed with which people can communicate online, part of it is that people are somewhat removed from what they say online, part of it is the breadth of the audience that exists online,” he explained.

The ease with which anyone can fire off a threat to the president’s Twitter account does not necessarily make such threats less concerning, Citron noted. “Sometimes people say online threats are never to be taken seriously because we’re behind a screen and we tend to just kind of mouth off without thinking, but on the other hand when someone writes something down then there’s the perception that its thoughtful—someone took the time to write this down,” she said.

“The anonymous part doesn’t make it less threatening, but it makes it harder for us to gauge whether it’s a joke or not.”

Many online threats are not even anonymous, Sellars pointed out. “People are making a shocking number of these threats posting on Facebook using their real names,” he said, calling to mind Sullivan’s comment about the letter writers who included their return addresses.

In a recent decision for the case Elonis v. United States, about a man accused of threatening his wife on Facebook, the Supreme Court avoided establishing any clear test for how to identify true threats online. Their decision to dodge the issue leaves not just the Secret Service but everyone who is the victim of online harassment to figure out how to draw the line between true threats and free speech on the Internet.

When it comes to protecting the president, however, that distinction may not be so vital, either online or offline. Kessler noted, “Actual assassinations are usually not preceded by threats.”