[p2p-research] Attack Tyrrany at It's Weakest Link -- Enforcement

[Kevin Carson]

http://c4ss.org/content/5564

Goo-goo liberals and “good citizens” of all stripes are fond of saying
that “We must continue to obey the law while we work to change it.”
Every day I become more convinced that this approach gets things
precisely backwards.  Each day’s news demonstrates the futility of
attempts at legislative reform, compared to direct action to make the
laws unenforceable.

The principle was stated most effectively by Charles Johnson, one of
the more prominent writers on the libertarian Left (“Counter-economic
Optimism,” Rad Geek People’s Daily, Feb. 7, 2009):

“If you put all your hope for social change in legal reform, …then…
you will find yourself outmaneuvered at every turn by those who have
the deepest pockets and the best media access and the tightest
connections. There is no hope for turning this system against them;
because, after all, the system was made for them and the system was
made by them. Reformist political campaigns inevitably turn out to
suck a lot of time and money into the politics—with just about none of
the reform coming out on the other end.”

Far greater success can be achieved, at a tiny fraction of the cost,
by “bypassing those laws and making them irrelevant to your life.”

Johnson wrote in the immediate context of copyright law.  In response
to an anti-copyright blogger who closed up shop in despair over the
increasingly draconian nature of copyright law, he pointed to the
state’s imploding ability to enforce such laws.  The DRM of popular
music and movie content is typically cracked within hours of its
release, and it becomes freely available for torrent download.  Ever
harsher  surveillance by ISPs in collusion with content “owners” is
countered by the use of anonymizers and proxies.  And the
all-pervasive “anti-songlifting” curriculum in the publik skools, in
today’s youth culture, is met with the same incredulous hilarity as a
showing of “Reefer Madness” to a bunch of potheads.

The weakest link in any legal regime, no matter how repressive on
paper, is its enforcement.

I saw a couple of heartening news items this past week that illustrate
the same principle.  First, a judge in Missoula County Montana
complained that it would soon likely become almost impossible to
enforce anti-marijuana laws because of the increasing difficulty of
seating juries.  In a recent drug case, so many potential jurors in
the voir dire process declared their unwillingness to enforce the pot
laws that the prosecution chose to work out a plea deal instead.  The
defendant’s attorney stated that public opinion “is not supportive of
the state’s marijuana law and appeared to prevent any conviction from
being obtained simply because an unbiased jury did not appear
available under any circumstances…”  The same thing happened in about
sixty percent of alcohol cases under Prohibition.

Public agitation against a law may be very fruitful indeed — but not
so much by creating pressure to change the law as by creating a
climate of public opinion such that it becomes a dead letter.

Another morale booster is the rapidly improving technology for
recording cops, which Radley Balko (a journalist whose chief bailiwick
is police misbehavior) describes in the January issue of Reason
Magazine (“How to Record the Cops”).    Miniaturized, unobtrusive
video cameras with upload capability can instantly transmit images for
storage offsite or stream content directly to the Internet — which
means that the all-too-frequent tendency of thuggish cops to seize or
destroy cameras will result only in video of the very act of seizure
or destruction itself being widely distributed on the Internet.
“Smile, Officer Friendly — you’re on Candid Camera!”

The practical implication, according to Balko, is this:

“Prior to this technology, prosecutors and the courts nearly always
deferred to the police narrative. Now that narrative has to be
consistent with independently recorded evidence. And as examples of
police reports contradicted by video become increasingly common, a
couple of things are likely to happen: Prosecutors and courts will be
less inclined to uncritically accept police testimony, even in cases
where there is no video, and bad cops will be deterred by the
knowledge that their misconduct is apt to be recorded.”

As such technology becomes cheap and ubiquitous, police will
increasingly operate in an atmosphere where such monitoring is
expected — and feared — as a routine part of their job.  Even the most
stupid and brutal of cops will always carry, in the backs of their
minds, the significant possibility that this might be one of the times
they’ve got an audience.

New technology, empowering the individual, will soon deter cops in a
way that decades of civilian review boards and police commissions
failed to achieve.

So the goo-goos have it backwards.  Don’t waste time trying to change
the law.  Just disobey it.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html