When the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) breaks into 1,300 computers with a single, vaguely written warrant it’s labeled justice. But when somebody breaks into the FBI’s computers it’s labeled criminal:
A hacker, who wishes to remain anonymous, plans to dump the apparent names, job titles, email addresses and phone numbers of over 20,000 supposed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) employees, as well as over 9,000 alleged Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees, Motherboard has learned.
The hacker also claims to have downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of data from a Department of Justice (DOJ) computer, although that data has not been published.
This is something that fascinates me about statism. It’s relies on the belief that humans are inherently bad and that the only solution is to absolve a handful of those humans of any responsibilities for their actions so they can control the rest.
A lot of people are willing to give the FBI a pass in breaking into 1,300 computers because the operation was dealing with combating child pornography. While I detest child pornography I also detest throwing due process out the window whenever it becomes inconvenient. There’s no way the FBI could know that all 1,300 computers it broke into were involved in the child pornography site. Not every visitor to a site is a user. Sometimes people are tricked into visiting a site, sometimes they’re curious if a site is actually as terrible as people are claiming (and often report sites containing illegal content to law enforcers if they find those claims to be true), etc. Due process involves identifying suspects based on evidence and investigating them specifically.
Further compounding the issue is the fact the FBI was knowingly distributing child pornography from its own servers. The agency was quite literally doing the exact same thing it was supposedly trying to stop.
Yet many people are calling what the FBI did justice while labeling what the hacker did as criminal.
Yes. In a just society, government officials are constrained and the populace is free. In a tyranny such as the U.S. today, the opposite is the case: government officials do anything they please and the rest of us commit three felonies a day and hope no one in government dislikes us so much that they call us on it.