What happens when a young man, bent on amorous pursuits, jokingly threatens to blow up an airport named after Robin Hood? He becomes a bit of a folk hero himself. But if you're a member of the judiciary or the constabulary, Paul Chambers is little more than an outlaw.
Mr. Chambers, a 27-year-old British accountant who now lives in Northern Ireland, sent out an ill-advised Twitter message on Jan. 6: He was planning to travel to meet a woman, and Robin Hood airport near Sheffield was closed because of snow. "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!"
Mr. Chambers's tweet would have sunk out of sight except that an airport employee noticed it during a random search and it landed on the desk of the Crown Prosecution Service, which decided that this was not a bad joke, but a threat. He was arrested at work in front of his colleagues; his computer was confiscated. Although nobody believed he had intended any actual threat, he was found guilty of sending a menacing communication. He lost one appeal, and is embarking on a second.
As Mr. Chambers prepares to take his fight against his conviction to Britain's High Court, he is now an unlikely Twitter martyr. A Twartyr, you might call him, if it didn't sound like a rude noise made by a five-year-old. There are benefit concerts being staged to raise money for his legal costs, and Stephen Fry has offered to foot the bill.
Egged on by the ridiculousness of the situation, thousands of supporters have retweeted his original message, under the umbrella tag, "I am Spartacus." In that film, you may remember, the Romans couldn't take Kirk Douglas away because his fellow slaves understood the power of the shielding crowd; much like the citizens of Twitter.
On the surface, Mr. Chambers's case may seem trivial; a man makes a juvenile joke in a tense environment and gets his wrists slapped. But his supporters say the ramifications are much more serious: For one thing, Mr. Chambers lost his job, and has been burdened with a criminal conviction and £2,600 (about $4,100) in court costs. (He will have to pay more if he loses his High Court appeal.) On a much wider scale, it's about how the law can possibly keep up with the speed of technological and social change.
"We're in this netherworld between speaking and publishing," says Padraig Reidy of Index on Censorship, Britain's leading organization in defence of free speech. "The law does seem to see online communication as publishing, but that's not how most people think of it - they think of it as a conversation."
Indeed, Mr. Chambers was charged under Section 127 of Britain's Communications Act, which is normally used to prosecute telephone stalkers ("a bad application of a good law," says Mr. Reidy, who points out that it was last updated in 2003, before Twitter was a twinkle in anyone's eye.)
Can laws ever be drafted quickly enough to respond adequately to the way communication is evolving? If, as Mr. Reidy says, people treat social media as a conversation, the lesson is that you can't control who's invited to the party. Mr. Chambers learned this the hard way, as did Pete Broadbent, the Church of England bishop suspended this week for writing on Facebook that the hoopla around the royal wedding was "nauseating tosh."
Of course, the case is also about the Twitter universe's distaste for being policed in any form, and for its understandably tribal desire to stand up for one of its own. Not too many people rushed to support Draco Slaughter, another embattled airport jester who was arrested after a flight from Chicago this summer when he (feebly) joked that a bag he had left on board the plane might contain a bomb. But then, Mr. Slaughter was 75, required a legal aid lawyer, and probably thought Twitter was something that birds do.
According to David Allen Green, one of Mr. Chambers's legal advisers, the case has the possibility to be as epoch-defining as the obscenity prosecutions against the publishers of Oz magazine and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Mr. Chambers may have lost his job, but he has kept hold of his black sense of humour, even while looking for work.
"Ten minutes at the Job Centre was still enough time for my soul to attempt a daring escape," he posted on Twitter this week. As of this writing, neither the Job Centre nor his soul has threatened to sue.