This was not in China or Burma, but in Washington state, USA.

A Tacoma seventh grader faced federal interrogation at school for what he posted on his Facebook page.  His mom said it all happened without her knowledge or permission.

After Osama bin Laden was killed, 13-year-old Vito LaPinta posted an update to his Facebook status that got the Feds attention.

“I was saying how Osama was dead and for Obama to be careful because there could be suicide bombers,” says LaPinta.

I imagine that the Feds’ computers have spiders which crawl the internet and were alerted to this “threat”.

A week later, while Vito was in his fourth period class, he was called in to the principal’s office.

“A man walked in with a suit and glasses and he said he was part of the Secret Service,” LaPinta said. “He told me it was because of a post I made that indicated I was a threat toward the President.”

Now he’s more careful about what he posts online.

And that was probably the point of the exercise, to make an example of him – to train people to just talk about the weather, or sport, or what’s on the telly tonight.

His mother says she isn’t financially able to take legal action but hopes her family’s story raises awareness about the treatment she said her son endured.

The Seattle branch of the Secret Service did not respond to requests for comment.

This seems to be happening more and more, where people in authority consider themselves to be judge and jury and non-accountable.

This is the country that our traitor former Home Secretary Blunkett agreed a one-sided extradition agreement with whereby an American court can basically just ask for a UK citizen to be sent there and our police go and arrest them.

I use Facebook quite regularly, and Twitter. I would be surprised if what we are saying here in the UK is not also being monitored. In fact, I wonder if these social networking sites were set up for this very function. Before YouTube was full of adverts, I used to wonder how (and why) they gave people unlimited storage space for uploading videos for no obvious financial gain.

I have just visited young Vito’s Facebook page. At the time of writing, he has seven friends. This is odd, because I know these youngsters like following each other. Of his friends, two don’t allow the public to view their friends, but the number of friends of the other five range from 218 to 766.

Did Vito also have hundreds of friends? He looks like he would, doesn’t he? Have all of his “friends” bar these seven unfriended him out of fear?

Maybe I should add him as a friend. Or maybe he feels he’s in enough trouble already. Maybe he’ll be waterboarded if he is found to associate with the likes of me.

Source and hat-tip.