The 'Kill Obama?' Facebook Poll Is No Joke for the Secret Service

The creator of the Facebook third-party application at the center of a Secret Service investigation is Jesse Farmer, a computer programmer and entrepreneur living in Palo Alto, California, DailyFinance has learned.

The Secret Service is investigating after someone posted a poll using an application created by Farmer asking, "Should Obama be killed?" The possible answers were "no," "maybe," yes," and "yes if he cuts my health care." Facebook quickly yanked the poll Monday -- and the Secret Service may be quickly yanking some moron out of bed early this morning.

Early Tuesday, Farmer posted the following to his Twittter account. "Life TODO: [X] Have a phone conversation with an agent from the US Secret Service." To be clear, Farmer is not the person who created the poll, but rather the creator of the third-party application used to create the poll.

"The conversation with the SS was fine," Farmer tweeted. "If the goal was to resolve the issue + inform the SS, the way it went down was suboptimal." Farmer did not immediately return a request for comment.

"We worked with Facebook to have the poll taken down, and we're investigating further," Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan told DailyFinance. "We can't discount anything. We have to take this seriously."

Indeed. And most likely, the first thing they did was ask Facebook and the third-party application developer to turn over the IP address of the user who posted the offensive poll. With that information in hand, agents would be able to locate the computer on which the poll was created and perhaps even the person who created it.

Read the rest of this post at DailyFinance.com