The Mind of David Krider

Via Wanna know how bad things are in Beijing? This ain’t fog, and this is middle of the day. – Imgur.

Tell me again that the US ought to restrict it’s pollution emissions even further — at astronomical expense — before this problem is addressed.

Worthy ideas in the abstract, but horrible in the details: cyber-security is a genuine concern, as we’ve seen repeatedly. But this bill is easily the worst attack on the open internet since the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an online censorship bill that was killed in the wake of widespread opposition early last year.

Via Oppose CISPA If you value any privacy in our digital world | Dan Gillmor | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

When will both sides wake up and realize that a government large enough to start taking basic liberties away from one group is going to take them all away for everyone!? Just like every other bill that has been defeated by protest in the past dozen years, Congress just waits for people to tire of the fight — like a toddler having a fit — and then passes the law their cronies want anyway.

One after another, our freedoms and Constitutional rights are being abrogated. People don’t seem to mind as long as it’s someone else’s freedoms and preferred liberties, but that whole “first they came for” thing is more relevant than ever. I love this issue, because some people have woken up and realized that all this government regulation and all these federal benefits they thought they were in favor of maybe aren’t such a good idea after all.

We haven’t had any privacy on the internet since it was invented. The NSA has monitored everything on it since it was created by… THE GOVERNMENT. (Funny how that worked, isn’t it?) The Fourth Amendment died 20 years ago. What Congress is debating now is giving some of the power to overstep that Constitutional protection to private corporations, but, really, this is just the Feds “outsourcing” their efforts. All the big telcos and applications (like Facebook) readily hand over any data they get asked for, without a warrant, and usually under a secrecy order. CISPA will just allow them to save the effort of getting judges involved and having federal employees do the legwork. That will free them up to investigate a lot more people. It’s a win-win! </sarcasm>

You could say that the free press has been derelict in their duty to make people recognize the situation, but people just can’t wrap their heads around the scope of the problem, and they’re powerless against it anyway. Both “sides” of the “isle” are pro-big-government. It’s just a question of which big business they’re in the pocket of, industry or entertainment. So let’s just have more “reporting” on what Justin Beiber did today, please. Thank you very much.

Cornyn, echoing a growing number of people, suggested the government was bullying Swartz by ratcheting up the charges.

The Texas lawmaker asked: “Does it strike you as odd that the government would indict someone for crimes that would carry penalties of up to 35 years in prison and million dollar fines and then offer him a 3- or 4-month prison sentence?”

Holder responded: “I think that’s a good use of prosecutorial discretion to look at the conduct, regardless of what the statutory maximums were and to fashion a sentence that was consistent with what the nature of the conduct was. And I think what those prosecutors did in offering 3, 4, zero to 6 was consistent with, with that conduct.”

via Attorney General: Aaron Swartz Case Was a ‘Good Use of Prosecutorial Discretion’ | Threat Level | Wired.com.

The people asking questions of the government in this matter are way too focused on the specifics of this particular case. The question we should be asking is why do prosecutors get to hand out a sentence on accused people before the trial? Perhaps the whole point of a plea bargain has been lost.

How about this for a change? Let legislators write laws and punishments to reflect justice. Let a jury determine if the accused should be held accountable to the spirit and intent of it. Then let a judge pass sentence according to the nature, depth, and the attitude of the infraction.

That’s the way the system used to work, but just like the federal government, we’ve been letting once-separated powers slowly congeal back together again for a long, long time. Remember the old saying, “No jury in the land would convict me if..?” You probably don’t, because the chance that a jury would even get a case these days is minimal, and the chances that the prosecutor would seat that rare person, familiar with the concept of jury nullification, are even less. And the chances that the case really did call for it… And the chances that the person who understood nullification could talk the rest of the jury into it…

The entire point of the Samuel L. Jackson movie, A Time to Kill, was jury nullification.

The only “discretion” government prosecutors should be using is whether the crime justifies the application of the government’s limited resources to address. All the rest should be left to other people. In this case, the answer was a pretty clear, “NO!”