And I have empathy for the politican who received the threat - having been there myself it is profoundly frightening.

I also have great sympathy for those writing into cyfswatch, they have come up against forces that are beyond them and are at their wit’s end. These are not lives with happy endings.

A death threat is not acceptable, and I don’t know why the blog owners weren’t on top of it, or made the decisions they did. At least now it is out in the open and if law enforcement needs to deal with those involved, they can.

While the blog owner is anonymous to us, he/she/they aren’t to the hosts and ISP. While threats are wrong, the overall premise of the blog isn’t. If writing in gives people an opportunity to warn others, vent, find ways to cope (beyond revenge) then it serves it’s purpose.

Government isn’t benign, any one of us can be caught in the endless loop, where a department rises to the height of it’s incompetency. It is not an either/or situation, but when your children are involved, even caring people can be perceived as being part of an impossible situation.

I may have more background in all this than most people reading about the Google action, and I do endorse the Google action because they did not ban the authors, they only removed the site and after repeated warnings. The authors are still free to cool-down and try again. Nonetheless I can sympathize and I can easily imagine how they never meant any real harm to the object of their frustration, they were simply savouring the feeling of a wholey imagined victory.

Because it is frustrating. Most people live their lives thinking government is benign, that it is their friend, and largely, it is. But that does not preclude how, when you do happen to find yourself in the path of your own government, you will see how it shows no mercy, how it unflinchingly tramples and destroys without the least sign of humanity, and that is just as true in the Family Services departments as it is in the Military or the Tax Collector’s Office. Get in their way, and you will understand how that image of Tiennaman is only just more blantant and direct than what you have at home.

And may you never live to experience that feeling.

What were they thinking? Or is that the problem — they weren’t?