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Comment by Confusion | Hacker News Reader

What really gets to me in this story is that the mother is being prosecuted for 'obstructing execution of a search warrant', by -- allegedly -- helping her son hide a laptop. That's just cold, heartless fascism. In a decent country they would question her and leave it at that. Idem if it was a father, brother or a random friend, with otherwise no criminal record, no chance for recidivism and no other part in the crime being investigated. The government and the police should be here to protect us. You aren't protecting anyone by marking this woman a criminal and you are actively failing to protect her.

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In a decent country they would question her and leave it at that.

I would say that our prosecutors are lucky they don't live in such a country, but frankly our prosecutors are a big reason why the USA is not a decent country. The fact that prosecutors can threaten any member of a defendant's family with any number of 3F/d crimes is a big reason they're able to coerce so many plea bargains. If we only had necessary laws that forbid actual crimes, instead of the many shelf-feet of unknowable laws we have, you'd see far more defendants claiming their rights to fair trials. Today's prosecutors probably wouldn't be able to cope, since they'd have to spend their time prosecuting rather than dreaming up new techniques of pretrial coercion.

I also find it ridiculous that they charged him for "obstruction of justice" for not being at home when they executed the search warrant. It's not like they told him in advance they were coming to search his house.

Not really understanding this myself... I'm pretty sure they don't need a key to come into a normal house or apartment. Unless he happens to live in a bunker...

I think the "obstruction" was taking his laptop to his mother's house. The warrant covered confiscation of his personal devices, so removing the laptop from the house would be an obstruction if he was doing it deliberately, which he most likely wasn't.

By that logic they could get him for taking his smart phone with him when he left the house.... something everyone is guilty of every day.

Yeah, but not everyone is having a warrant served against them. It's obviously ridiculous, just like charging his mother with obstruction is, but you kind of have to marvel at the prosecutor's deviousness in charging him for something that would have been innocuous if they weren't charging him for something else.

This is no different than a mafia good smashing out your teeth with a baseball bat because your nose hurt his fist. What's going on in this case is totally clear and the government doesn't care that it's illegal. By using all these nonsense "laws" to do what they would do regardless, they're just throwing salt in the wound.

> "The government and the police should be here to protect us."

With respect to invasions by foreign powers, yes. But neither the government nor the police can be expected to actively protect individual citizens. Protection via deterrent forces (e.g. laws against violent crime) is all the police and government can really do. If you want to actively protect yourself and your family, it's your responsibility to do so. Outsourcing that job to the government and police is how we got to a our current state--they can't "protect us" without sufficient power, which we readily handed over.

Personally I'm glad that NOAA, FDA, EPA and other agencies exist and help protect me.

You should learn more about the FDA. It kills many Americans by slowing down the adoption of new drugs, and by adding serious cost to the development of new drugs. In other areas, the FDA is "captured" by industry and offers no protection. For example, the FDA has no rule or standard on arsenic in food, despite evidence that the carcinogen is commonly in US brown rice. Placing your faith in a government agency is foolish-- we'd be better off without the FDA because people would take the threats more seriously and you'd have more effective private certification programs fill in the gap.

I'm not so sure about the "effective private certification program." How exactly would a private certification board avoid the same conflicts of interest that plague the FDA?

Also take a look at the current state of the organic and non-GMO certification programs that exist.

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