US Secret Service hunts Facebook user after presidential death poll

• The US Secret Service is hunting for a Facebook user who posted a poll on the social networking website asking if President Obama should be killed.
• The poll offered four possible answers – “yes”, “no”, “maybe” and “If he cuts my healthcare” – and received 730 responses before the authorities were notified and Facebook removed it from its site.
• Threatening the President is a crime under federal law and the Secret Service, which is responsible for Mr Obama’s safety, said last month it had seen a 400 per cent surge in death threats against him since the launch of his push for healthcare reform earlier this year.
• News of the poll prompted demands from Democratic Party activists that whoever was behind it be prosecuted and jailed, but the Secret Service left open the possibility today that it was a high school prank that could still go unpunished.
• Posting a poll was not necessarily against the law, a source close to the investigation told The Times, adding: “What we have to do is determine the person’s intent and the only way we can do that is to interview him.”
• A Facebook spokesman said the poll had been posted to the site by a “third-party developer”, whose content is not subject to screening for offensive material.
• Some of those who would like Mr Obama dead have said so with little obvious fear of repercussions. One demonstrator at an anti-healthcare reform rally in New Hampshire last month carried a gun and a placard with the message: “It’s time to water the tree of liberty” – a reference to a warning from Thomas Jefferson, often quoted on the extreme right, that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots”.
• Earlier this month the Rev Wiley Drake, a Southern Baptists minister in Orange County, California, told an interviewer that he was praying for Mr Obama’s death. Far from being muzzled, he has won a first-round victory in an effort to show in court that the President was not born a US citizen. A preliminary date for a hearing has been set for January 2010.

By www.michaeljackson50.com