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In Florida, we have a major problem with unmarried women parachuting on Sundays. In Texas, you may not shoot a buffalo from the second story of a hotel. The first floor and third floor are still OK. You can also shoot a buffalo on the second floor from the third floor.

You May Think You Have Nothing to Hide … But You Are Still Breaking Laws Which Government Spying Could Discover and Use Against You

You Break the Law Every Day … Without Even Knowing It

James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School and former defense attorney, notes in his excellent lecture on why it is never a good idea to talk to the police:

Estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary. It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes. These laws are scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate, by reference, the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA thinks there are ”nearly 10,000.”

If the federal government can’t even count how many laws there are, what chance does an individual have of being certain that they are not acting in violation of one of them?

As Supreme Court Justice Breyer elaborates:

The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.

For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster.

If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.

Attorney Harvey Silverglate says that the average American commits 3 felonies every day … without even knowing it.

And that’s just federal laws.

8 Ways We Regularly Commit Felonies Without Realizing It

The fact is that we live in an overcriminalized society where vague federal laws are dangerous for everyone, lawyers, judges and police officers included. This ambiguity invites varying interpretations and could stamp a permanent criminal record on the otherwise squeaky clean slate of an unknowing, harmless individual.

Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent

The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to “white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.

We're All Felons, Now

Perpetual public fear of crime has turned us all into criminals.

We're perpetually expanding police and prosecutorial power, a process only occasionally slowed by the courts. Congress and state legislatures rarely take old criminal statutes off the books, but they're always adding new ones. A 2008 report from the Heritage Foundation estimates that at the federal level alone, Congress has been adding about 55 new crimes to the federal criminal code each year since the 1980s. There are now about 4,500 separate federal crimes. And that doesn't include federal regulations, which are increasingly being enforced with criminal, not administrative, penalties. It also doesn't include the increasing leeway with which prosecutors can enforce broadly written federal conspiracy, racketeering, and money laundering laws. And this is before we even get to the states' criminal codes.

Even Fox News says this is terrible. A real-life horror story: You are a felon and you didn't even know it

Krister Evertson is the type of person we all strive to be: Eagle Scout, National Honor Society member, worker with the deaf and hearing impaired, and all-around law-abiding citizen.

Krister sold raw sodium, which is perfectly legal and used in variety of applications. Raw sodium must be shipped by ground transportation, not through the air. Unbeknownst to Krister, even when he checked off “ground” on the shipping label, UPS may ship by air.

Krister was arrested at gunpoint. He was found not guilty, but the government wouldn’t stop there. After spending $430,000 in tax dollars, the government subsequently tried and convicted Krister for abandoning the ”toxic” materials he clearly and carefully stored under another’s supervision. Krister spent nearly two years in federal prison.

Krister’s story is no far-fetched exception to some arcane law. Thousands of law-abiding citizens have been convicted under the more than 300,000 federal provisions, most of them administrative -- in other words not passed by Congress -- that carry a criminal penalty.

And this horror story could happen to you. It is estimated that each American commits three felonies a day without ever knowing it. And just as was the case with Krister, many of these regulations carry no requirement that you knew or should have known you were doing something illegal—the intent of your actions is irrelevant.

Even the ultra-conservative National Review says this is a terrible problem. Too Many Laws Means Too Many Criminals

There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime,” retired Louisiana State University law professor John Baker told the Wall Street Journal in July 2011. “That is not an exaggeration.”

That may sound unbelievable, but this is a lesson some Americans have, sadly, learned the hard way, through no real fault of their own.

John Yates, for example, built his career as a commercial fisherman. In August 2007, Yates and his crew were fishing in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast when a state conservation officer, who was also a deputized federal agent, boarded his vessel to inspect their catch of red grouper.

After inspecting some 3,000 fish, the official identified 72 red grouper that did not meet the minimum 20-inch conservation standard and issued a citation from the state. He ordered Yates to bring the undersized catch when he returned to port.

When Yates returned to port the next day, armed federal agents stood by while inspectors reexamined his catch, finding only 69 fish under the minimum standard. Federal officials accused Yates of destroying evidence — the missing three red grouper — related to a federal investigation.

www.youtube.com/embed/d5WOwC5Fs64

Only a fool believes he has nothing to hide. The fool just doesn't know all the things he has to hide because of our corrupt and over-criminalized legal system. The fact is that everyone over 18 is a felon whether or not he or she knows it. This is why domestic spying and selective enforcement is evil and tyrannical.

#politics #crime