Weapons, Guns, Firearms Joking about a terroristic threat

LUMPKCH

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Pennsylvania
If I jokingly text a friend about a terroristic threat, will my text message be monitored by my cell phone provider or the government?
 
The police can't get those texts without a warrant, and that means they must already have some suspicion that the texts would provide evidence of a crime. So if your friend doesn't reveal that to anyone else it's unlikely any police trouble would follow. However if your friend reacts with fear and contacts the police about it, then they'll be sure to see it and you might well end up facing charges for that. In this day in age, it's really not a good idea to make fake terrorist threats as a joke. Police take those kinds of messages seriously and if turns out to be a joke, they won't happy about that and the prosecutor likely will find a law to charge you with for pulling police off other work on a fake threat. Once you send the text, you lose control of it and don't know what will happen with it. That's taking a risk that just isn't worth it.
 
If I jokingly text a friend about a terroristic threat, will my text message be monitored by my cell phone provider or the government?

The NSA has buildings full of agents monitoring all cell phone transmissions for key words that indicate a potential terrorist threat.

I've seen that in a couple of movies so it must be true. :)

Do you want to take the chance that it's not?
 
The NSA has buildings full of agents monitoring all cell phone transmissions for key words that indicate a potential terrorist threat.
Not agents but computer algorithms that listen to every phone call and text message that transmits through cell towers and landlines.

And it's not just terrorist threats. You threaten the President (even in jest) and you're going to get a visit.
 
Not agents but computer algorithms that listen to every phone call and text message that transmits through cell towers and landlines.

And it's not just terrorist threats. You threaten the President (even in jest) and you're going to get a visit.
I never made a threat as terrible as that, and I never will. I'm not gonna mention exactly what I said. It was just one text message and the conversation was over. I won't be making jokes like that ever again. What are the chances that one text message sent by one person out of the billions of text messages sent everyday by everybody in the country is gonna be noticed by the government? That is what I want to know.
 
April 11, 2023
One of the most sweeping surveillance statutes ever enacted by Congress is set to expire at the end of this year — creating an important opportunity to rein in America's sprawling surveillance state.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits the U.S. government to engage in mass, warrantless surveillance of Americans' international communications, including phone calls, texts, emails, social media messages, and web browsing. The government claims to be pursuing vaguely defined foreign intelligence "targets," but its targets need not be spies, terrorists, or criminals. They can be virtually any foreigner abroad: journalists, academic researchers, scientists, or businesspeople. And in the course of this surveillance, the government casts a wide net that ensnares the communications of ordinary Americans on a massive scale — in violation of our constitutional rights.






Be afraid, be wary, act after reflection, use EXTREME caution, restrain yourself BEFORE you wreck yourself!!!

Big brother and big sister are omnipresent and lurking everywhere, 24/7/365 and beyond into eternity.
 
I never made a threat as terrible as that, and I never will. I'm not gonna mention exactly what I said. It was just one text message and the conversation was over. I won't be making jokes like that ever again. What are the chances that one text message sent by one person out of the billions of text messages sent everyday by everybody in the country is gonna be noticed by the government? That is what I want to know.

The algorithms mentioned by Welkin listen for single words or short phrases and the conversation can be pinpointed with deadly accuracy.
 
The algorithms mentioned by Welkin listen for single words or short phrases and the conversation can be pinpointed with deadly accuracy.

There are, however, some limits placed on federal agencies as to what communications they can routinely scan without a warrant. The Constitution didn't get thrown away when the Congress enacted these statutes. They had to be written in a way that would pass muster in the federal courts. This is why there is a heavy emphasis on cross border communication in those laws because it's easier to argue that the foreign person involved is not protected by the Constitution.

When a warrant is needed to make a criminal case and the agency didn't get one, the agency may often still use the information it gets for some other purpose, e.g. to intervene to prevent some harmful act that is being planned. That information would not be useful in a criminal prosecution and those targeted are unlikely to ever know their communications had been intercepted. If the government gets it wrong (and of course it has on occasion) and tries to prosecute someone relying entirely or mostly on the improperly obtained communications the prosecution will find its case tossed out by the courts.

When reading the stories about this stuff, it's important to distinguish between what the government may do in a criminal investigation versus use of information for some other purpose, and too often articles about fail to make that distinction clear.

While my view is that these statutes, even if Constitutional, are bad policy and overly intrusive. Congress should not just keep renewing its authorization of agencies to do this stuff. From what I've been able to gather from what information is publicly available the government isn't even getting a whole lot of useful information from these programs, which in my mind raises problems of wasted money and effort on top of the privacy concerns. But the agencies keep using them, in part because they fall in love with all the high tech stuff they can get. We see the same thing with local and state police departments getting surplus military goods, much of which isn't really useful or justified for civilian policing. The cops like those toys and want to get their hand on it even if, as often happens, they rarely make any good use of it. So more money and time is wasted on things that do little good. The public ought to be more outraged at these abuses of their tax dollars.
 

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