COMMENTERS AREN'T THE PRESS:

Predictably, the comment thread attached to it quickly became a fever swamp filled with vulgarity and vitriol. Another day, another out-of-control online comment thread -- what else is new? Yet in this case the problem went a bit farther than normal when a handful of anonymous commenters threatened Judge Forrest with murder.

That's more than enough to warrant deleting those comments and banning the people who made them. But that wasn't good enough for the Justice Department, which decided to issue a subpoena demanding that Reason turn over, in the words of an NPR report, "'any and all identifying information' for the users, including subscriber accounts, credit card information, associated email addresses, and the unique IP address of each post."

Commenters like the ones who drew the attention of the federal authorities are pests. They poison online discourse on websites all over the internet. They're a menace to civility and manners. But do they really constitute a threat sufficient to justify the government issuing subpoenas to magazines, demanding personal information about their readers, putting financially vulnerable publications in the position of having either to comply with the order or risk spending vast sums of money on pricey legal counsel?

And what of the loudmouthed jerks themselves -- the people who spend their days anonymously spewing venom online? Sure, they're irritating. But they're also taking advantage of anonymity freely offered to them to express unpopular and extreme views. Do we really want to live in a country where such people need to fear a government unmasking followed by the FBI knocking on their door, asking intimidating questions and threatening them with prosecution?

The white male who shot dead nine church-goers at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, told police he almost did not engage in the attack because "everyone was so nice to him", according to sources quoted by NBC News.

However the 21-year-old, who was arrested in Shelby, North Carolina, after a 14-hour manhunt, decided to go ahead with his mission. Anonymous officials told CNN that Roof, who was extradited to South Carolina and is expected at a bond hearing, confessed to killing African-American people at the Emanuel AME Church because he wanted to start a race war.

The shooter is reportedly a committed racist, with his roommate revealing that he had been "planning something like that for six months".

Dalton Tyler told ABC news that Roof "was big into segregation and other stuff". "He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself," Tyler said.

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