Baker was charged under a law that prohibit the use of interstate communications to make a threat. Had he written a letter to his classmate Jane Doe, or sent an open letter to a newsgroup that he knew included her, there is little doubt that he would have fallen afoul of this law. Because he included Jane Doe as a character in one of a series of stories he posted to an alt.sex newsgroup--the rest of which apparently dealt only with fictional characters--and because it was not clearly foreseeable that the story would come to Ms. Doe's attention, it is hard to characterize this as a threat. As for the mail he exchanged with his Canadian correspondent, there appears to have been no overt act in connection with this conspiracy other than the email itself; therefore this appears to be a very weak case. From this point of view, the authorities may have acted prematurely; surveillance until the Canadian (who apparently used an alias and has not been identified) showed up might have resulted in a more solid case. But the Canadian may never have showed up, because, as we all know, there is a lot of talk, little action, on Usenet. Since the Oklahoma City bombing, there has been a lot of attention paid to calls for violence, and the exchange of bomb recipes, in Usenet newsgroups; if each of these were a crime, we could fill the prisons full of Internet users.