Student Charged With Online Terrorist Threat

Raising the stakes in the ongoing dispute over freedom of speech in cyberspace, the Sacramento County district attorney’s office has charged a Texas college student with making a terrorist threat against California state Sen. Tim Leslie over the Internet.

Jose Saavedra, a 19-year-old freshman at the University of Texas at El Paso, was released on bond this week after being arrested earlier this month in El Paso and spending 16 days in El Paso County Jail. The Sacramento County district attorney’s office began extradition proceedings this week to bring him to trial in Sacramento. If convicted, he will face a fine of up to $5,000 and a maximum of three years in prison.

Law enforcement officials said the case appears to be the first involving a threat to a public official over the Internet.

The computer message, posted to several environmental and political Internet discussion groups March 6, alluded to Leslie’s support of a ballot measure that would have removed special protections for mountain lions in California.

It read in part: “Let’s hunt Sen. Tim Leslie for sport. . . . I think it would be great if he were hunted down and skinned and mounted for our viewing pleasure.”

A week later, Saavedra apparently posted a second message under the code name “Zuma”: “Do I recommend that we hunt down and kill Tim Leslie and his family? NO. . . . Would I be happy if some nut actually did such a thing? YES.”

Leslie (R-Carnelian Bay), a self-described “Internet junkie,” said his concern over the messages was magnified by the fact that millions of people around the world could read the posting and perhaps be incited to actions of their own.

“From time to time when you’re in a job like mine, you’ll get a threat, but it’s usually between the person doing the threatening and the person being threatened,” Leslie said. “What’s so sinister about using the Internet is now everyone is privy to it. People all over America are discussing my death threat.”

Speech on the computer network is subject to the same legal standards as speech in any other medium. And under California law, speech that seriously intends to threaten is a felony.

But in cyberspace, where talk is cheap, context is fleeting and “flame wars” are routine, legal experts and civil liberties advocates contend that any evaluation of a threat needs to take the nature of the medium into account.

“Whether speech constitutes a threat or not depends on the context in which it occurs,” said Andrew Good, an attorney at the Boston law firm Silverglate & Goode, who has handled several cases involving free speech in cyberspace. “People say things on Net that they have no intention will ever reach the person mentioned. But the Net has this propensity to broadcast that isn’t reflected in much of what is said.”

Distinguishing a threat to a public figure from political speech, which is protected by the 1st Amendment, has been closely scrutinized over the years. One of the best-known examples is a 1969 case in which a Vietnam War draftee said words to the effect that if he were given a gun, “the first person in my sights would be LBJ.” The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that was protected political speech.

But on the Internet no such precedent exists. The Saavedra case underscores some of the peculiarities of the evolving nature of discourse on the Internet. As millions of Americans plug in to the gargantuan computer network, many are taking the new freedom to publish--with a global reach--to heart.

Moreover, the relative anonymity of online communications and the ease with which messages fly back and forth have fostered a habit of hyperbole and sometimes vicious attacks seldom aired in other forms.

Still, whatever the failings of “netiquette,” said Margaret Crosby, an attorney with the Northern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, “if we are going to continue to have the Internet as a forum for spirited and vivid rhetoric, then we must apply the constitutional protections that have traditionally safeguarded vivid political expression.”

Cases like Saavedra’s stoke fear among Internet users that the electronic medium will be held to a different standard.

In a closely watched case last year, a University of Michigan student who sent graphic e-mail messages about torturing young women was charged with transmitting a threat over state lines by electronic mail. That case was dismissed.

Patrick Marlette, a spokesman for the Sacramento County district attorney’s office, said such threats have to be taken seriously, whatever medium they come in.

“This situation may have caught the public’s eye more than other threats, but the fact that it’s on the Internet is really of no weight,” Marlette said. “If Mr. Saavedra intended his comment as a threat, that’s all the law requires, and we are serious about prosecuting that violation.”

In El Paso, county Sheriff’s Sgt. Don Marshall said Saavedra was released on bond; he was not required to post bail. “People out here don’t think it’s really that serious. The words he used weren’t too appropriate, maybe, but that’s a young man’s language,” Marshall said.

But law enforcement officials say it is an issue they are increasingly having to grapple with.

“If an agent overhears two people in a bar watching the news and one says, ‘I’m going to kill that guy,’ and starts laughing, and the other one starts laughing too he’s probably not going to do anything about it,” said Scott Charney, chief of the computer crime unit at the U.S. Department of Justice.

“But now let’s say we’re in an online chat room and the same thing happens. You don’t know if the people are down the block or a hundred miles from each other. All you get are the cold words. You don’t have the human context on the Net, so it’s going to be difficult to tell.”

Mike Gibson, a 1st Amendment attorney in El Paso, has agreed to take Saavedra’s case with no fee for a limited time.

He said he would fight the extradition proceedings, which in the Internet world of collapsed geography, also have a cyber-twist.

“Anytime someone in one state takes umbrage at something someone says about them in another state, they’re going to extradite?” asked Gibson. “It makes for some interesting precedent.”

Ron Turner, Saavedra’s high school teacher, recruited Gibson after the student’s father, who works as a janitor at the school, told him his son was in trouble. Turner said Saavedra was a decent student who was working at a local electronics store when he was arrested.

“There’s no question in my mind, he did not mean it as a threat,” Turner said.

Leslie disagrees: “It’s a lesson people on the Internet need to learn. There are limits. And if they cross those limits, they’ll be arrested, jailed and brought to trial.”