An Experiment in Scotch

Imag­ine if you will a soci­ety where the fol­low­ing is pos­si­ble. You take your hard earned dol­lars to a bank. You deposit your checks, write checks to your cred­i­tors, pay your elec­tric bill, maybe even have a sav­ings account or two. Hun­dreds of other peo­ple in your com­mu­nity do the same. The bank is prof­itable and pop­u­lar. It serves the pur­pose of being a bank to many cit­i­zens. How­ever, unbe­knownst to you and the fine upstand­ing com­mu­nity mem­bers who use the bank, there are a few peo­ple who use the bank to laun­der money. They sell drugs or run pros­ti­tu­tion rings or what­ever, then deposit the money in the bank. They use the money to buy other non-illegal items like real estate or what­ever the hot new item is that money laun­der­ers use this year for their dirty money.

The Feds get wind of this sit­u­a­tion. They embark on a 2 year inves­ti­ga­tion into the money laun­der­ers, track­ing their move­ments, their actions, their dirty money laun­der­ing. After 2 years, they have enough evi­dence to know who these peo­ple are and decide the time is right to take action. They swoop in but instead of arrest­ing the peo­ple who are laun­der­ing money, they shut down the bank, con­fis­cate all the accounts and money in the bank, arrest 8 of the exec­u­tives and then flip the mid­dle fin­ger to every­one involved. The money laun­der­ers decide it’s high time to retire to Antigua for a few years and hop on the next plane out of town. Mean­while, you can’t get any of your money. Your elec­tric gets cut off, a big hairy dude with a Dirty Harry revolver comes and repos your car and the sher­iff shows up to kick you out of your house because you haven’t paid your mortgage.

That doesn’t sound like a very sound way to go about chas­ing down money laun­der­ers does it? If we lived in a soci­ety like that, you’d think shit had really hit the fan and that maybe we were fun­da­men­tally bro­ken in a way that worked hard to pun­ish as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble regard­less of inno­cence or guilt, just to get at money laun­der­ers, who in the grand scheme of things, aren’t really that dan­ger­ous. Sure, they’re break­ing the law and should be pun­ished but it would take a real fas­cist to jus­tify the col­lat­eral dam­age involved in shut­ting down a bank, just to get money launderers.

Sadly, that’s the soci­ety we live in now as it relates to online piracy of movies and music. Yes­ter­day, the Feds shut down a site called MegaU­pload which with­out a doubt con­tributed to online piracy in some way but which also served a much larger and more benign pur­pose: shar­ing files. Today, all the peo­ple who used MegaU­pload as a file shar­ing for­mat in good faith have exactly ZERO access to their files. We are liv­ing in an increas­ingly con­nected and cen­tral­ized world where the pow­ers of a fas­cist gov­ern­ment can have far reach­ing effects on inno­cent vic­tims all in the name of solv­ing a prob­lem not that many peo­ple are inter­ested in solv­ing. And in fact, the only rea­son we are try­ing to solve it is because the peo­ple who ARE inter­ested in the prob­lem are extremely pow­er­ful and rich, a dan­ger­ous com­bi­na­tion in a polit­i­cal sys­tem run by the rich and pow­er­ful and power hungry.

The Feds didn’t need SOPA or PIPA or any­thing else to shut down MegaU­pload. The Inter­net isn’t free today, regard­less of the SOPA protest world­wide on Wednes­day. Our gov­ern­ment can, at will, freely inflict a great deal of pain on large pop­u­la­tions of inno­cent peo­ple in the name of track­ing down online pirates. The heavy hand­ed­ness is astounding.

Jus­tice is founded on many prin­ci­ples but one of its pil­lars is the idea that it is more impor­tant not to con­vict a sin­gle inno­cent per­son than it is to let all the guilty in the world go free. As ratio­nal, just, decent crea­tures, it should be far more press­ing to ensure no inno­cents are ever con­victed even if it means let­ting some guilty par­ties go free. No just sys­tem can be based on any­thing else. And yet, our gov­ern­ment no longer seems to be a just sys­tem of gov­er­nance. From the ben­e­fits and col­lu­sion of those on Wall Street with those at the high­est lev­els of gov­er­nance to this lat­est episode of shut­ting down a site that hap­pens to facil­i­tate online piracy occa­sion­ally, we are see­ing that jus­tice seems to be rarely served at all and when it is, it’s almost always off the mark.

I wrote an essay ear­lier today about try­ing to avoid the urge to blow things up and start over. I truly believe that’s the best way to solve things. But a gov­ern­ment that ignores the need to be just will foment anger and hatred among the gov­erned, anger and hatred that very well may boil over into the streets. It seems like hyper­bole to think that the shut­ting down of MegaU­pload will cause civil unrest but even­tu­ally, there will be a straw too heavy for the camel to con­tinue. I hope we can come to some alter­nate con­clu­sion before that happens.