Moxie Marlinespike wrote: If the federal government can’t even count how many laws there are, what chance does an individual have of being certain that they are not acting in violation of one of them? As Supreme Court Justice Breyer elaborates: "The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation." For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster. If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statutes or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 00:18:35 +0000