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Comment by jaywalk | Hacker News Reader

In my home country (that I share with the US Marshalls) you have the constitutional right to express a desire for harm to come upon anyone or anything, regardless of whether it's a federal judge or not. It's worrying that a federal agency would do anything in regards to comments that are clearly protected by the constitution.

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you have the constitutional right to express a desire for harm to come upon anyone or anything

Do you have a source for that beyond "the 1st ammendment"? This feels like the kind of thing that has an exception.

I think "inciting violence" is not covered. Certainly, threats are illegal, not sure how veiled those threats need to be to circumvent that.

It's quite the other way around: threats must be very specific in order to not be protected speech in the United States. Saying 'let's burn this mother down' during a protest is protected speech, for instance. In general, the threat must be specific and imminent, such as 'let's go to that building right there and do $violence right now!'

They have been mentioned several times in this thread, but you should consult Popehat's writings for in depth breakdowns of what is and is not protected speech.

The doctrine is "imminent lawless action".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action

Pointing at a person during riots and screaming "Kill that muthafucka now" would almost certainly cross the threshold.

Organizing an unofficial Wannsee conference to plan a genocide of $UNDESIRED_GROUP into details would not, even though the entire event would be a hatefest.

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