You'll note that every time someone says something racially insensitive and overly public from the anonymity of twitter, the masses come out of the woodwork and scream that they ought to go to jail. In Singapore, they actually do. (Or, hopefully, they just don't bother.) It's worth noting that much of the west has a severe double standard on this (and in Britain, at least, people get prosecuted for the exact situation I'm describing; just as they do in Singapore).

I'm a little curious if you could expand on what you mean by the double standard. After thinking about what you said, I did a little casual research into hate speech laws, particularly in the United States. I'd say that I'm generally supportive of laws which target hate speech, but only insofar as the speech in question passes the "imminent lawless action" test established in Brandenburg v. Ohio. I was a little surprised to find myself also agreeing with Scalia's majority decision in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul:

"As explained earlier, see supra, at 386, the reason why fighting words are categorically excluded from the protection of the First Amendment is not that their content communicates any particular idea, but that their content embodies a particularly intolerable (and socially unnecessary) mode of expressing whatever idea the speaker wishes to convey. St. Paul has not singled out an especially offensive mode of expression—it has not, for example, selected for prohibition only those fighting words that communicate ideas in a threatening (as opposed to a merely obnoxious) manner. Rather, it has proscribed fighting words of whatever manner that communicate messages of racial, gender, or religious intolerance. Selectivity of this sort creates the possibility that the city is seeking to handicap the expression of particular ideas. . ."

Displays containing some words, such as racial slurs, would be prohibited to proponents of all views, whereas fighting words that "do not themselves invoke race, color, creed, religion, or gender — aspersions upon a person's mother, for example — would seemingly be usable ad libitum in the placards of those arguing in favor of racial, color, etc., tolerance and equality, but could not be used by those speakers' opponents." The Court concluded that "St. Paul has no such authority to license one side of a debate to fight freestyle, while requiring the other to follow Marquess of Queensberry rules."

The more I look into it, the more I realize it is a complicated issue where clear-cut rules are hard to determine. I'm not really active on Twitter, so I can't say that I'm familiar with the phenomenon there, but I think the SCOTUS has tried to walk a fine line between defending as much of the 1A as possible while still giving room to proscribe "fighting words". I'm curious what the specifics are of the law in Singapore. Are you saying that the SCOTUS jurisprudence on this topic embodies a double standard? Certainly the 1A only applies to the proscription of speech by the state, so whether hate speech should be banned by Twitter is perhaps a different issue.

I would hazard a guess that the so-called slippery slope argument which I despise so much is actually closest to being a potential reality in a city with a culture like Singapore's. We've seen seemingly stable situations plunge into martial law or dictatorial rule several times in Southeastern Asia. According to the article, things are trending in the other direction, but that doesn't mean a whole lot. We'll see.

I definitely agree. Singapore has an interesting style of government; it strikes me as a very well managed democracy with the dominant party PAP having control over the courts and media.

If you implement something like this in the United States -- in other words, even more encompassing than what we have -- you get the same amount of intrusion but way too many things slipping through the cracks. I bet. I don't know.

I can't say with any evidence, but from what I gather, and the author made an oblique reference to this, that the TIA program was largely preserved, through reshuffling, renaming, and transferring parts of it to the NSA. A TIA program like that does seem to be problematic, especially if monopolized by an intelligence community, both in regards to civil liberties and effectiveness.