Abuse Of Power: Feds Seize Websites

I am a long-time critic of the use of government criminal power to do the bidding of private interest groups. This weekend showed again exactly why. The Department of Homeland Security. . . which can’t seem to keep terrorists from boarding airplanes with bombs, can’t secure our ports, can’t secure our borders, and can’t catch or convict a single terrorist except by pure luck. . . spent its weekend doing the bidding of the Recording Industry Artists of America (RIAA) and undermining our judicial system.

I’ve spoken about the RIAA and my disgust for their tactics before. They are an organization that tried to create a monopoly on music, tried to stand in the way of innovation, and when that failed, they lobbied (successfully) to upturn a thousand years of jurisprudence, by eliminating ideas like “innocent until proven guilty” and “the right to face your accuser,” and used the power they obtained to extort money out of average people in the hopes of terrorizing people into stopping file sharing. Their targets have ranged from individual users, to parents, to colleges, to employers, to ISPs. . . guilt or innocent hasn’t mattered to them.

Well, now they’ve got Homeland Security doing their dirty work for them. This weekend, Homeland Security shut down at least 72 websites and seized their domain names because they have been accused of file sharing. There has been no conviction, no hearing, no warning. . . just the accusation.

What’s more, not all of the websites shutdown were even accused of file sharing. One website, Torrentfreak was essentially a search engine. It neither hosted copyright material nor did it directly link to copyrighted material. Instead, it linked to sites that linked to file-sharing material. In other words, this would be like shutting down Google because you can use it to find sites that offer illegal material.

Three things are worrying about this.

First, this is not something Homeland Security should be wasting their time on. Their primary mission is to protect us, i.e. to keep the homeland secure. Working on side issues like this is a distraction from the mission that they are already not doing very well.

Secondly, it troubles me greatly that they have converted what is a private matter between two parties, i.e. copyright infringement, into a criminal offense with the full power of the federal government coming down on the side of the politically connected. There are thousands of claims of infringement of varying degrees and with various levels of merit each year, is Homeland Security to start shutting down tens of thousands of websites each year?

Moreover, what happened to proving guilt? There was no trial in this instance. Even worse, there was no right to face the accuser and no right to appear in court to challenge the ruling or present counter-evidence. This was essentially a raid done on the basis of probably cause. Anyone who knows anything about the criminal justice system knows that “probably cause” is synonymous with “the accuser’s suspicion.” This is the most easily abused legal standard imaginable.

Letting the authorities seize websites and shut them down without a conviction is deeply troubling. Our court system is the only thing protecting us from an overreaching government. And the fundamental cornerstone of our court system is that you have the right to appear and to challenge the evidence against you. The system Homeland Security and RIAA are exploiting, however, is a system based on the principle of “guilty until you can get a trial date to prove yourself innocent.” That’s unAmerican.

Finally, it is very disturbing that all of this is being done to please a highly-connected political lobby. This was not done to protect the public from harm or to maintain law and order. This was done because the RIAA has been unable to stop file sharing by extorting money from the public (a process proven to be much abused by RIAA), so it wanted to step up the firepower. If we allow this, what’s next?

It is the slipperiest of all slopes when we sell the power to have the federal government’s brutal police power at your beck and call, and when all you need to do to get the government hopping is to swear that you have a suspicion of wrongdoing. Should we let Homeland Security shut down your website because a debt collector claims you haven’t paid a bill? Should we let Homeland Security shut down your website because you failed to pay spousal support? What if you’re giving out advice that might be considered criminal? Bomb making? Sure. But what about a website listing speed traps? What about a website listing how to avoid ObamaCare’s requirements? Do we really want the government doing this?

This is very bad for our country.