“There’s one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you. I’m not going to rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts.” Are those words (as part of a similarly ominous series of posts) enough to to convict a person of making violent threats? According to today’s decision from the Supreme Court, the answer is: not necessarily. The justices threw out the conviction of Anthony Douglas Elonis and indicated that “the government must do more than prove that a reasonable person would find the postings threatening.”

+ The Elonis case is representative of the ongoing struggle of our legal system to navigate the blurred line between our online and offline selves. In another much more prominent case, Silk Road leader Ross Ulbricht asked a judge to show mercy during sentencing: “I’ve had my youth, and I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age.” The answer he got was life in prison. Meanwhile, a key agent who was working undercover online to build a case against Ulbricht was recently arrested as the Justice Department found that he “developed additional online personas and engaged in a broad range of illegal activities calculated to bring him personal financial gain.”

+ If you haven’t read it yet, don’t miss Josh Bearman’s two part piece on the rise and fall of Silk Road. It’s an exciting read, and it also surfaces issues of identity that are certain to be recurring themes in courts of law and public opinion.