Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, has argued that humans tend to have “censorship envy”: Once my neighbor gets to ban speech that offends him, I feel entitled to ban speech that I revile.
Dorschner would not say whether there was an investigation into Professor Rat, calling the matter an issue of “internal security.” The columnist for The Boston Globe, whose sin, in the eyes of Professor Rat, was to criticize civil libertarians for objecting to the Patriot Act of 2001, said he did not take the threat at all seriously. He learned of the threat only last week, when told of it by The Denver Post,
The posts made by Professor Rat fall under a relatively new category of crime known as “cyberstalking,” said Jim Doyle, a retired New York City police sergeant who now works as a cybercrimes consultant for a Connecticut company called Internet Crimes. The statements made by Professor Rat constitute prosecutable offenses, he said. “The bottom line is what the victim feels,” he said. “Is the victim threatened? Is the victim alarmed? Hey, that’s a crime.”
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles and a First Amendment specialist, said the threats were probably criminal, given Taylor’s description of the purpose of Assassination Politics. But “in order to (prosecute), you have to get your hands on the guy,” he said.
