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Comment by mcantelon | Hacker News Reader

That's pretty much legalized tyranny then.

Yes it is: and like a number of such things, it stems from the War On (Non-White People Who Use) Drugs. The incentives regarding property seizure in narcotics cases are even more perverse, and lead to brazen de facto theft.

I think it was back in the 80s that Jello Biafra was arrested on drug charges and had property seized. The sheriff's office was able to legally sell the seized property before his trial. I don't know what happened to that law, hopefully it's been fixed since...

Civil forfeiture is based on a simple preponderance of the evidence, and has not changed.

But most people don't realize this, and they don't vote accordingly. So it persists and grows.

I think that's hyperbole. I understand the whole "damn the man" cynicism thing you got going on but there's two sides to the coin. When you work for law enforcement you get orders and you carry them out. These people are just like anyone else; honest people trying to get by. If anything it should be the ones giving orders who get canned.

>When you work for law enforcement you get orders and you carry them out. These people are just like anyone else; honest people trying to get by. If anything it should be the ones giving orders who get canned.

You could say the same thing about the cops in Russia who raid businesses that have gotten on the wrong side of the state or its business network. Of course it should be the ones who give the orders who get canned. But noone gets canned.

The definition of tyranny is "arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power". That accurately describes the current situation where authorities can, with no risk to themselves, freely take your property and destroy your livelihood even when you've broken no laws. The fact that the US can even do this to people in other countries should be concerning to anyone who values rule of law.

This is the whole point of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

"I merely played my part"

Don't forget the Milgram Experiment:

http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/7article/article...

http://youtu.be/W147ybOdgpE

And the good ole Elevator Experiment:

http://youtu.be/aX1gL5Zqkao

Ugh I knew that either the prison experiment or Nazis would come up. Hyperbole. It's a real fine line and equating some of the things people have retorted with to what's happened with MegaUpload isn't fair. They're not n the same level. Yeah, there's potential for abuse but at the same time I see this as a necessary evil. You trust and hope that they get things right most of the time. That's the social contract we all enter into unless we want anarchy.

But all I was saying is try to see things as the other side would. As the guys carrying out orders would. We have a hard time putting ourselves in others' shoes around here. Try it out and maybe what I said will sound just a little more reasonable.

They're all functionally the same thing, as in they all relate to the same principal:

"Doing bad things just because you were told to do so doesn't absolve you of the responsibility for doing bad things"

It applies whether you are a cop, a third reich officer, an employee at a corporation, whatever. The principal still stands.

First, making an honest mistake does not give you automatic immunity in any other legal area, and there's no obvious reason it should here. If I'm a private contractor following the instruction of Cisco systems and I destroy the electrical system in your house, I have to pay for it even if it's an honest mistake. Now, it's perfectly fine for Cisco and I to agree as a condition of my employment that they will take on responsibility for any damage I cause in their employ, but that's between Cisco and me.

If if we wanted to give such automatic immunity, the way to do this is simply to assume that an agreement like the one described above has been made: i.e., the government should have to compensate you. If state, acting as a collection of flawed humans, harms an innocent person, the state as a whole should have to compensate that person.

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