Preet’s Web Offensive

Lock up every troll and crackpot who posts an overthetop online comment, and you’d need to double (at least) the number of prisons in this country.

That’s one reason the US Supreme Court last week made it harder to prosecute people for threats made on social media, overturning the conviction of a Pennsylvania man who’d repeatedly posted long tirades on Facebook.

Yet not 24 hours after that ruling, US Attorney Preet Bharara’s office served a grandjury subpoena to the libertarian Web site Reason.com, demanding it identify several anonymous commenters.

Seems the noname posters took angry exception to a Manhattan federal judge’s sentencing of Ross Ulbricht, who was the mastermind of the online drug marketplace Silk Road, to life in prison.

And they responded with moronic comments about feeding Judge Katherine Forrest to a woodchipper or shooting her on the courthouse steps.

Vile and unconscionable stuff, of course. But genuine threats? A lot of cretins talk trash when protected by the anonymity of an online account.

Problem is, the Supreme Court ruled that lawenforcement action’s not justified unless there is a “true threat” — made with the credible intent of carrying it out.

The comments on Reason are plainly just idiotic hot air.

So the subpoena seems a dangerous case of overreaction — by an office whose attorneys must regularly appear before the same judge.

Yes, the US Marshal’s Office is investigating real threats against the judge posted on the “dark Web” — sites that require special settings or permission to access.

But that doesn’t justify treating every online blowhard on a public site as a likely assassin.

For better or worse, the Web encourages hyperbole. Policing it requires prudence — which Bharara’s office seems to have ignored with this subpoena.