Nabb1: Oh, yeah? Can you name one?

It's been confirmed in the past by Drew and/or the mods. I previously worked for a group responsible for network security at a well-know university, and can confirm that the Secret Service has made visits to students who post threats to the president publically online.

It's fairly well-known that the Secret Service does this, even for stuff that seems minor. I don't know what their do-or-do-not investigate criteria are, but I've always assumed it's a mix of casting a wide net and good old Cover Your Ass.

I don't consider reading posts on a largely public internet thread to be "spying."

That's actually interesting as a topic in itself. I think there's more grey out there than people realize, largely due to the privacy/anonymity you get when it's too tedious for humans to pull together lots of public information. As more databases get linked together and mined, it can be quite unsettling to see the results.

There's also the matter of us, as a society, determing how much surveilance is too much...

Nabb1: But, given the public nature of this particular forum, I would hardly consider it "spying."

I somewhat agree with you, but to me it's more complicated than that...

I think most people would (and do) accept limited/targeted monitoring, when it makes sense. For example, watching a website whose members have been making threats, or even just seem likely to.

But you fundamentally change the perception of monitoring when you suddenly expand it to a massive scale ("if one, then all"). A government that monitored and analyzed all public communication would be rather disturbing to me. Expand that to monitoring large amounts of private communication, and it's downright frightening.

Anyway, back to Kennedy.

I have no sympathy for him. I called shenanigans on the student's story from the start -- I'd expect a US Senator to be able to do a little basic fact checking before shooting his mouth.

It just really irritates me when people grasp at the crazy stories in order to try and argue a point. ESPECIALLY when there's plenty of rational evidence sitting around. The best example of this was the 2000 and 2004 elections. I don't think they were rigged, but I think that they exposed a number of potential flaws in the system. No big deal, a little tweaking and fine tuning would take care of it. But the zealots on both sides turned it a hot-button issue, and so polarized the issue that it's difficult to have a calm, rational discussion about it. The end result is that no one wants to touch it, and everyone gets the shaft.