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June 13, 2004
Crime and Punishment
Several ongoing trends are changing how America handles criminals, including the federalization of crime, concrete-bound statutes, profound skepticism that refuses to convict heinous villains, and an altruism-driven envy that seeks to destroy heroes.
Federalization of crime seeks to usurp power formerly held by the states, and makes the judicial system less accountable. This is scary combined with the separate trend (I may write another blog entry about this one day) of each branch seeking the powers of the other two. The courts have taken upon themselves the power to legislate and execute laws.
A growing percentage of the criminal statutes, particularly most of the new ones, target a particular class of criminal or victim. If it’s already illegal to kill someone, why is there a need to make a separate crime if the deceased was gay?
OJ Simpson and Martha Stewart are the most famous examples of skepticism-based acquittals and envy-driven convictions of our era.
These issues are well-known and discussed even outside Objectivist groups. The topic of this essay is something that I have not read about anywhere else. The power of the Internet is that if one can do something, one can scale that something without additional cost.
The same is true for crime.
I have received several spam emails urging me to “validate†my credit or ATM cards by logging onto something that looks like Citibank® immediately. A quick look at one of these emails today showed that while the URL looked like it was under www.citibank.com, the href actually pointed to www.citi-protection.info. According to the WHOIS report on www.networksolutions.com, this site is owned by Giancarlo Basso in Palo Alto, CA.
Given the magnitude of the damages of this kind of crime, I expect that the real Citibank will fund the investigation, file a lawsuit, and this individual will face a big legal battle. Maybe he will even go to jail.
The lesser question is why on earth does it take a motivated, deep-pocketed victim to ensure that a criminal of this sort is brought to court? Isn’t the job of the government to find these people—even if the victim is poor or not savvy about the law?
What burns on my mind, however, is why do such people not face the death penalty?
Please hear me out. What Mr. Basso (if that is his real name) has discovered is that the Internet scales. One website and one email can dupe hundreds or thousands of people. This sure beats the old confidence artist game of calling door to door and robbing people one at a time. Punishment ought to scale also.
The person ought to be tried for each count of fraud, each count of forgery, each count of larceny, etc. I do not have a strong opinion whether the limit is 3, 5, 10, or even 25 convictions. But after some threshold, surely the prosecution should ask for a death penalty on the grounds that the criminal has done more damage than his worthless hide can repay now or ever.
It’s time to wake up, smell the coffee, and acknowledge that the Internet today is ruled by anarchy. Almost anyone can get away with almost anything. Innocent people have to be extremely suspicious, spend money and time avoiding being victimized, and are bombarded by brazen criminals constantly. Is this what the founding fathers envisioned? If you sat down to design a society from scratch, would you optimize it for maximum criminal opportunities and innocent people be damned?
The problem of crime on the Internet is easily solved. First, reassert the government’s leadership in the area of criminal investigation and prosecution. Second, scale the charges proportionally to the crime. Third, jail or execute the criminals. Fourth, demand extradition when the criminals hide in foreign countries. Fifth, disconnect non-extradition countries from our Internet. It is not clear to me what value is obtained by Americans from the fact that Nigeria is connected to the Internet. But so long as criminals can hide there and prey on Americans, the disvalue is obvious and enormous.
I say “easily†in the sense that the logic is simple and straightforward. Persuading the mercy-granting bible-thumpers, and the envious socialists will not be easy.
Posted by Bearster at June 13, 2004 2:08 PM
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Comments
I disagree with a number of things in your email, but let me mention a few:
The Internet is not “ruled by anarchy.†The vast majority of the Internet is controlled by responsible private and non-commercial organizations. The majority of spam and fraud comes from a small number of “open†servers in primitive or corrupt nations. Relative to the amount of legitimate activity that goes on, the fraud is insignificant.
Second, while the Internet greatly enlarges the audience of potential victims, it’s more difficult to steal large sums of money, or to fool large numbers of people, or to remain undetected for long, so damages are not significantly greater online.
Third, avoiding being scammed is not that difficult or time consuming, as long as one takes a few simple precautions. The raw number of fraud emails does not change that fact.
Fourth, the Internet is a truly global network, and it’s not possible to “disconnect†any large nation from the internet without constantly monitoring its borders for wireless signals and wires. Many scammers use servers all over the world to carry out their dirty work, and the US cannot force all other nations to crack down on scammers because the enforcement ability simply does not exist.
Posted by: David at June 18, 2004 12:14 AM
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