Would you pay good money for accurate predictions about important events, such as election results or military campaigns? Not if the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has its way. It recently took enforcement action against overseas prediction markets run by InTrade and TEN. The alleged offense? Allowing Americans to trade on claims about future events.
The blunt version: If you want to put your money where your mouth is, the CFTC wants to shut you up.
A prediction market allows its participants to buy and sell claims payable upon the occurrence of some future event, such as an election or Supreme Court opinion. Because they align incentives with accuracy and tap the wisdom of crowds, prediction markets offer useful information about future events. InTrade, for instance, accurately called the recent U.S. presidential vote in all but one state.
As far as the CFTC is concerned, people buying and selling claims about political futures deserve the same treatment as people buying and selling claims about pork futures: Heavy regulations, enforcement actions, and bans. Co-authors Josh Blackman, Miriam A. Cherry, and I described in this recent op-ed why the CFTC’s animosity to prediction markets threatens the First Amendment.
The CFTC has already managed to scare would-be entrepreneurs away from trying to run real-money prediction markets in the U.S. Now it threatens overseas markets. With luck, the Internet will render the CFTC's censorship futile, saving the marketplace in ideas from the politics of ignorance.
Why take chances, though? I suggest two policies to protect prediction markets and the honest talk they host. First, the CFTC should implement the policies described in the jointly authored Comment on CFTC Concept Release on the Appropriate Regulatory Treatment of Event Contracts, July 6, 2008. (Aside to CFTC: Your web-based copy appears to have disappeared. Ask me for a copy.)
Second, real-money public prediction markets should make clear that they fall outside the CFTC's jurisdiction by deploying notices, setting up independent contractor relations with traders, and dealing in negotiable conditional notes. For details, see these papers starting with this one.
[Aside to Jerry and Adam: Per my promise.]
[Crossposted at Technology Liberation Front, and Agoraphilia.]
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
CFTC Targets Prediction Markets; Hits First Amendment
Saturday, October 15, 2011
U.S. Supreme Court: “Private” = “Public”
What does “private” mean in the U.S. Constitution? The word appears there only once, in the Fifth Amendment’s Taking Clause: “[N]or shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” You might think that “private” means something like “not owned by the government.” The Supreme Court, however, evidently thinks it means something else.
My most recent paper, “Property” in the Constitution: The View from the Third Amendment, 20 William & Mary Bill of Rights J. __ (2012) (forthcoming; invited), discusses that and other linguistic perversions, all towards demonstrating that courts would do better to adopt the plain, present, public meaning of the text. Here, edited for your browsing pleasure, I describe the Supreme Court’s twisted interpretation of “private” in the Takings Clause.
In U.S. v. 50 Acres of Land, 469 U.S. 24 (1984), the Supreme Court held that the Takings Clause’s protection of “private Property” covers property owned by state and local governments. The Court admitted that “the language of the Amendment only refers to compensation for ‘private property,’ and one might argue that the Framers intended to provide greater protection for the interests of private parties than for public condemnees.” Id. at 31. The Court nonetheless went on to hold that “private” includes “public”:
When the United States condemns a local public facility, the loss to the public entity, to the persons served by it, and to the local taxpayers may be no less acute than the loss in a taking of private property. Therefore, it is most reasonable to construe the reference to ‘private property’ in the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment as encompassing the property of state and local governments when it is condemned by the United States. ibid.
We might well doubt the Court’s logic in equating inter-governmental transfers with takings of private property, as well as the truth of the claim that a taxpayer feels the loss of local public property as keenly as the loss of a home. We might likewise doubt the 50 Acres court’s invocation of U.S. v. Carmack,329 U.S. 230 (1946), a case the Court had decided nearly 40 years earlier. In fact, the Court in Carmack merely took note that the federal government had conceded its obligation to pay for taking locally-owned public property. Because the parties did not contest the claim, Carmack could hardly have decided it. The Court in 50 Acres of Land thus had only itself to credit or blame for giving “private” an extraordinarily broad meaning.
In retrospect, following the controversial holding of Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), we can see a sort of perverse logic at work in how the Supreme Court reads the Takings Clause. Whereas the Court in 50 Acres held that the protections afforded to “private Property” extend to public property, the Court in Kelo held that “for public use” extends to takings for private use done “pursuant to a ‘carefully considered’ development plan.” Id. at 478 (quoting 268 Conn. 1, 54, 843 A.2d 500, 536 (2004)).
Just as the Supreme Court thinks that “private” includes “public,” in other words, it also thinks that “public” includes “private.”
Saturday, April 23, 2011
The Power of Property Rights
Why have property rights? This brief video, which I wrote and narrated for LearnLiberty, explains. Set in my hometown of San Clemente, the video co-stars some of the most lovely scenery that SoCal can offer.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Condoms, Cheap Pizza, Beer, and . . . the Rule of Law
Condoms, cheap pizza, beer, lotto tickets, bongs, military gear . . . what have they got to do with the rule of law? LearnLiberty, a project sponsored by the the Institute for Humane Studies, recently aired a video that I wrote and narrated on the question. Enjoy!
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
A T-Shirt to Save Miranda
Professor Crim Pro I ain't, but it seems to me that anybody who has used a computer can pretty easily grasp the holding of Berghuis v. Thompkins, 560 U.S. __, No. 08-1470 (June 1, 2010) [PDF]. In that opinion, handed down just yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court toggled the default on the Miranda warning. A five-justice majority held that silence will not suffice for citizens who want to invoke Miranda's protections against self-incrimination; we now must ask for our Constitutional rights. Think of it like a computer program that annoyingly assumes you want unsolicited advice from a chirpy paper clip--except this paper clip throws you in cuffs and tazes you if you talk back.
The Berghuis decision inspires me to offer a new piece of legal armor—this time in the form of a t-shirt:
Click on the picture to buy a shirt, or borrow the text (I've uncopyrighted it) to make your own version from scratch. Combine that notice of your Miranda rights with the bumper sticker and magnetic sign I offered earlier, in defense of your rights to record and report what public officials do to you, and you might just dodge some serious legal hurt. Or—who knows?—you might inspire some interesting and important litigation.
I leave detailed analysis of how Berghuis jibes with Miranda and other precedents to other, more knowledgeable commentators (see supra, "ain't Prof. Crim Pro" disclaimer). I dare say, though, that Justice Sotomayor's dissent hit a nice note:
Today’s decision turns Miranda upside down. Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent—which, counterintuitively, requires them to speak. At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so. Those results, in my view, find no basis in Miranda or our subsequent cases and are inconsistent with the fair-trial principles on which those precedents are grounded.Slip. op. at 23 (Sotomayor, J. dissenting).
I guess that you could say the Berghuis majority took a cue from the (so-called) libertarian paternalists and engaged in some legal nudging. In this case, however, the Court nudged our defaults away from individual liberty and toward prosecutorial power. Call it statist paternalism.
Thanks, Supremes, for giving us worse than nothing. Ah, well. As I read Berghuis, even the justices in the majority would not deny us the opportunity to answer their new default with a firm "No!" Thus might we recover our Constitutional rights with a t-shirt.
[Crossposted at Agoraphilia and The Technology Liberation Front.]
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Police May be Monitored for Quality Control Purposes
While police and prosecutors have encouraged the growth of a surveillance state, they don't seem so enthusiastic about the growth of a surveillance citizenry. Maryland and other states have recently seen privacy laws invoked to squelch the unauthorized recording of public officers performing public duties in public areas. Until courts put an end to those bogus claims, we should make sure that police officers know that we may monitor traffic stops to protect our rights; I below offer a bumper sticker and magnetic door sign that ought to help on that front.
Radley Balko recently reported on the latest attempt to use privacy laws to punish citizens for recording police misconduct. In this case, Anthony Graber was arrested for posting on YouTube a video he'd captured on an un-uniformed Maryland state trooper, driving an unmarked car, pulling over and rushing at Graber with a drawn handgun. Soon after Graber posted the video, he was charged for violating the Maryland Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act, Md. Code Ann., Cts. & Jud. Proc. § 10-401 et seq. (2010), which basically outlaws secretly recording a private conversation.
Maryland's police must be feeling a bit testy, these days, about getting recorded on-the-job by uppity citizens. Earlier this spring, an inconvenient video of the beating of Jack McKenna put the lie to the claims of Maryland police that McKenna had provoked the incident by attacking the officers and their horses. State and federal officials have since launched "excessive force" inquiries.
Did that video violate the privacy of the three officers, clad in riot gear and swinging batons, who surrounded and beat the unarmed McKenna? No. Neither did the video that Graber shot of the Maryland trooper strutting towards him with a drawn handgun. Courts have already explained that wrongs under the Maryland Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act require a showing that someone's reasonable expectation of privacy has suffered violation (see Fearnow v. C & P Tel. Co., 104 Md. App. 1, 655 A.2d 1 (1995), rev'd on other grounds, 342 Md. 363, 676 A.2d 65 (1996)), and no officer can have a reasonable expectation of privacy while on a public street, performing public duties.
The Maryland ACLU has stepped forward to help defend Graber, and with any luck will soon educate local prosecutors about the proper scope of the Maryland Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act. In the meantime, and in other jurisdictions where police threaten to deploy privacy laws against whistle-blowers, we citizens would do well to remind public servants that we can and will record their on-the-job performance. I've worked up a couple of notices to help.
This bumper sticker should help to put police on notice that you may record them during traffic stops, thus negating any claim to a reasonable expectation of privacy:
To make doubly sure that you give adequate notice to an officer who subjects you to a traffic stop, you might also want to carry this handy magnetic sign:
Click on either image to buy a copy for yourself or a friend. All proceeds will go to aid the defense of Anthony Graber. Perhaps his case would have turned out differently if he had had that bumper sticker on his helmet, or that magnetic sign on his gas tank. (I thank Prof. Orin Kerr for inspiring the wording of these notices, though he of course bears no blame for my legal hijinks.)
In the long run, as Prof. Glenn Reynolds has observed, we in the surveillance citizenry have an edge over those trying to create a surveillance state. We have more eyes, more cameras, and a more sympathetic message. There remain, however, several legal wrinkles to iron out before we can safely say we've turned the tables. I'll try to say more about those, and offer an all-purpose notice designed to cover a wide variety of citizen surveillance practices, in a subsequent post.
[Crossposted at Agoraphilia and The Technology Liberation Front.]
Sunday, May 24, 2009
How Union Bullies Fund their Critics
The L.A. Times' blog recently reported that the Los Angeles police officers' union tried to bully the San Diego Union-Tribune into firing editorial writers who argue that "lawmakers should cut back on salaries and benefits for public employees in order to help close gaping budget deficits." Gail Heriot calls the incident "chilling," and with good reason. I see a bright side to it, however.
Platinum Equity, a private firm, relies on a $30-million investment from the union's pension fund, along with large sums from the pension funds of other groups of California government employees, to help it buy companies. Platinum recently acquired the San Diego Union-Tribune. The L.A. police officers' union thus regards itself as a part owner of the paper—one that has purchased the right fire unwanted employees.
Exactly how much clout the union actually has over the paper remains to be seen. The San Diego Union-Tribune has publicly rebuffed the union's demands. As Heriot observes, however, "threats like these can cause a newspaper to soft-pedal its views even when the threats aren't carried out."
So what is the bright side? Many newspapers face financial difficulties, and would welcome capital infusions. This imbroglio will suggest to alert publications a ready way to attract investments from government-employees' unions: repeatedly and loudly demand that lawmakers reduce those employees' salaries and benefits. In effect, unions have signaled their willingness to subsidize their critics. State action would never have that effect; there is no profit to be had in suffering censorship. Score another point for the relative efficacy of market mechanisms—even when used by ignorant bullies—in encouraging freedom of expression.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
A Song for Loving Day
Happy Loving Day! On this date, forty-one years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court issued Loving v. Virginia, 88 U.S. 1 (1967), striking down state anti-miscegination laws as unconstitutional. All friends of liberty should venerate that worthy holding. Loving Day celebrations prove especially popular, though, among people born to parents of different races and among people in mixed race relationships.
As someone who loves both freedom and my hapa (Hawaian for "mixed race") family, I'm eager to spread the good word about Loving Day. In honor of both the holiday and my partner in miscegination, sunnyside d, I've composed Honolulu Hapa (d was born in Honolulu). I've posted the lyrics below. For more information about how to play the song, including the chords, please see this PDF document. (I later plan to post a recording, so that you can hear the style and melody of the song.) To further help celebrate Loving Day, I've released the song under a license that allows unlimited use of it on June 12 of each year.
Honolulu Hapa
Verse 1:
In Alto California we've got plenty of spice.
We mix it, fix it, quake it, bake it—mmm, that tastes nice.
So whip out every crayon in your coloring box.
Draw them all together. Man, that really rocks!
Chorus:
I say, "Thank you" to your mama. I say, "Thank you" to your papa.
I say, "Thank you, little lovely lady, Honolulu hapa."
I say, "Thank you" to your mama. I say, "Thank you" to your papa.
They crossed the line, they made you fine, my Honolulu hapa.
Verse 2:
I don't see any so-called "whites"; I don't see any "blacks."
I just see all of the shades of tan we wear upon our backs.
Loving v. Virginia put the racists in their place,
Feel a love more strong than law. Kiss a happa face.
Chorus
Bridge:
Hop into the melting pot.
Stir it, swirl it, make it hot!
The heat heats up, up to the top!
Can't hold it down, can't make it stop!
Hop into the melting pot.
Stir it, swirl it, make it hot!
Like cream that rises to the top,
can't hold us down, can't make us stop!
can't hold us down, can't make us stop!
Verse 3:
In Alto California we've got plenty of vice.
You can try it, you can buy it—if you pay the right price.
But ice the vice that hides inside that color-coded box.
Damn their lies! Trust your eyes! Dig every kind of fox.
Chorus
Coda
Fin
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Amsterdam on the Reservation
I'm currently attending a Liberty Fund conference on, "Liberty, Property, and Native America." The assigned readings, drawn largely from Self-Determination: The Other Path for Native Americans (2008), have exposed me to a wonderful range of new ideas. The chapter written by Ronald N. Johnson, for instance, "Indian Casinos: Another Tragedy of the Commons," opened my eyes to a way by which Native Americans might both radically increase their fortunes and our liberties. The idea, in brief: The same loophole that allows them to run casinos might also allow Indians to offer legal access to recreational drugs, prostitution, and extreme fighting.
Native Americans won the right to run casinos thanks to cases like California v. Cabazon Band of Indians, 480 U.S. 202 (1987), and Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Butterworth, 658 F.2d 310 (5th Cir. 1981), and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act ("IGRA") that such cases inspired. To generalize, U.S. law allows sovereign tribes to offer gaming services on their reservations, subject to three conditions:
- First and foremost, a reservation's host state must permit the particular sort of activities in question, even if under a very restrictive regulatory regime, rather than prohibiting and criminalizing them. In Seminole Tribe of Florida, for instance, the tribe successfully relied on the claim that Florida law allowed certain forms of bingo.
- Second, to judge from cases forbidding the sale of fireworks on reservations, and the illegality of Indians offering Internet gaming to off-reservation customers, a tribe must not exercise its sovereign powers so as to gut the effect of its host state's regulations. What happens on the reservation must, in other words, stay there.
- Third, as a matter of rhetoric if not hard law, it helps a tribe to emphasize that it has a long history of enjoying the same amusements that it offers its guests. Indian casinos thus often emphasize the role that games of chance traditionally played in the host tribe's culture.
Depending on the state and tribe, those three conditions might apply to a tribe offering recreational drugs, prostitution, and extreme fighting on its reservation. Thanks to Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), and 42 U.S.C. 1996a, for instance, states must permit the religious use of peyote, a traditional practice among some Native Americans. So long as a tribe administers that sacrament under controlled conditions, rather than by selling it for off-reservation use off, offering peyote would arguably qualify for the same sort of legal protections that have allow Indian casinos to thrive. Similar arguments might well apply to marijuana in many states (though here the case for traditional Indian use appears weaker than with regard to peyote), prostitution in Nevada and Rhode Island (though, again, the alleged "wife sharing" customs of some tribes do not quite equate to the same practice), and violent or even deadly sports among consenting adults.
According to Ambrose L. Lane, Sr.'s book, Return of the Buffalo: The Story Behind America's Indian Gaming Explosion 44 (1995), in 1979, California's Cabazon Band of Mission Indians considered cultivating marijuana and jimson week (a traditional Native American hallucinagen), only to set the idea aside. Beyond that, I've found no evidence that any tribe has considered pursuing the sort of legal strategy I've described. Given the large profits that offering drugs, sex, or extreme martial arts might garner tribes, however, and the competition that increasingly cuts into their gambling businesses, we might soon see many Native American Amsterdams.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Improper Signage
Okay, I fully support Jim Roos's fight to protect both property rights and freedom of speech. That said, I have a problem with this sign:
Mr. Roos appears to have fallen prey to a graphical form of over-negation. A red circle with diagonal slash means "stop or oppose the thing inside the circle." Does Roos really want us to stop ending eminent domain abuse?
(Via Cato-at-Liberty.)
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Stop Hating on Hate Crimes?
In the past, I’ve found “hate crimes” legislation troubling because any differential in punishment – such as the punishment for killing because of hatred minus the punishment for killing for some other reason – seems to constitute a punishment of mere thoughts. But perhaps not. I find Eric Zorn’s argument here fairly persuasive:
The simplest answer to this is that when hatred for a particular group or class or race is the obvious motive for an attack, that attack becomes, in effect, two crimes. The first is the offense itself. The second is the implicit threat that offense makes to other members of that group, class or race.In essence, the hate-crime punishment is not for having bad thoughts, but for issuing a threat of future violence – something we generally find acceptable to punish, even on libertarian grounds.
That second crime has new victims.
Consider an incident in which someone uses spray paint to deface the garage of a house into which a gay family has just moved.
The crime is vandalism, no matter what. But to argue against the idea of hate crimes is to argue that it shouldn't matter at all to the law whether the graffiti is a smiley face or some hostile, anti-gay slur.
The smiley face is a petty annoyance. The hateful slogan is, in effect, a threat to other gay people in the area -- they might be next.
Compare David Friedman’s argument for punitive damages in the case of “strategic torts,” that is, torts intended to send a threatening message to other potential victims. If the threat is successful, no future torts will need to be performed. As a result, the tortfeasor gets the benefit of committing many torts – by altering other people’s behavior – while only getting punished for one tort. Similarly, in the case of a hate crime, the hater can get punished for just one or a few crimes, possibly minor crimes, while getting the benefit of affecting many people in the threatened group.
My main concern with this position is that I think most people will tend to perceive hate crime laws as simply protecting the feelings or sensibilities of the protected groups, just as I did before I thought about it Zorn’s way. Indeed, that is often how the laws are justified even by their proponents. When they speak of harms to the protected groups, they often describe the harm in terms of “dignity” rather than threatened rights of person and property. Furthering this perception is the fact that hate crimes laws can be applied even in cases where the motive is not obvious – and thus could not plausibly constitute a viable threat to others.
And the perception matters, since laws like these can set precedents that pave the way for more laws based on (what are perceived to be) similar justifications. There is a slippery slope risk here.
UPDATE: Constant has a reaction over at Distributed Republic, with some good back-and-forth in the comments section (where I've chimed in).
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Declaring a Separate Peace in the Drug War
Via Micha Ghertner, the story of an American hero: Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco. Best known for allowing a spate of same-sex marriages in 2004, Newsom has now pledged to make San Francisco an immigration haven:
The mayor cannot stop federal authorities from making arrests, Newsom told about 300 mostly Latino members of St. Peter's Church and other religious groups supporting immigrants. But no San Francisco employee will help with immigration enforcement.Newsom’s strategy brings to mind one of my longstanding policy pipe dreams: that California, or some other state, might declare a separate peace in the drug war. “Yes,” the argument would go, “California does not have the power to repeal federal laws. But it does have to the power to dispose of its own budget and use its own state and city employees as it sees fit. From this point forward, if the federal government wishes to enforce federal drug laws in California, it will have to do so with federal tax dollars and employees. No state tax dollars or state employees will participate in fighting the drug war.” Essentially, the strategy would extend the state's current treatment of medical marijuana to drugs in general.
“I will not allow any of my department heads or anyone associated with this city to cooperate in any way shape or form with these raids,” Newsom declared. “We are a sanctuary city, make no mistake about it.”
Of course, the danger is that the federal government would strong-arm California into doing its bidding by threatening to withhold highway funds and other pork-barrel spending. But this is why California would be the ideal state for my strategy: with 53 U.S. representatives, it has the largest congressional delegation, which would presumably resist such budgetary tactics. Even Californian representatives who are drug warriors would have a difficult time depriving their home state of funds because of what the state government had done.
Could it happen?
Monday, March 12, 2007
Drug Testing and Unintended Consequences
Via Hit & Run, I find this article from the American Academy of Pediatrics arguing against random drug testing of students and employees. I was surprised to find relatively little on the problem of false positives. Here’s what the article says on that score:
School staff members and/or parents need to be able to assess possible false-positive results, especially when screening test results are positive for amphetamines or opioids. Over-the-counter cold medications containing pseudoephedrine can cause false-positive screening results for amphetamine, although follow-up testing with gas chromatography and mass spectrometry is highly specific and can reliably confirm the presence of amphetamine. Ingestion of foods that contain poppy seeds makes interpretation of drug testing more difficult, because it can cause screening and gas chromatography and mass spectrometry results to be falsely positive for morphine and/or codeine.Unfortunately, the article doesn’t report the percentage of positive test results that don't actually involve drug use. For some (possibly outdated) calculations like that, see here. Still, the article makes a number of strong arguments against random drug testing, including this one showing the AAP understands the importance of incentives:
With the exception of marijuana, the window of detection for most drugs of abuse is 72 hours or less. ... Standard drug-testing panels also do not detect many of the drugs most frequently abused by adolescents, such as alcohol, ecstasy ..., and inhalants, and information on the limitations of screening tests and ways to defeat them is widely available to adolescents via the Internet. Widespread implementation of drug testing may, therefore, inadvertently encourage more students to abuse alcohol, which is associated with more adolescent deaths than any illicit drug but is not included in many standard testing panels. Mandatory drug testing may also motivate some drug-involved adolescents to change from using drugs with relatively less associated morbidity and mortality, such as marijuana, to those that pose greater danger (eg, inhalants) but are not detected by screening tests. [emphasis added]In short, drug tests are most effective at detecting the least harmful drugs, so implementation of random drug testing could induce some drugs users to substitute into more harmful drugs to avoid detection. Nice.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
How Pinpoint Searches Widen the Net
For a long time, we’ve counted on the 4th Amendment to shield us from too-zealous enforcement of bad laws. But as Julian Sanchez reports in a recent Reason article, new technology could allow the authorities to do an end-run around the 4th Amendment:
In a nation whose reams of regulations make almost everyone guilty of some violation at some point, Americans have grown accustomed to getting away with minor transgressions: the occasional joint or downloaded movie or high-speed dash to the airport. For at least some crimes, though, the expectation that our peccadilloes will slip through the cracks may soon be outdated. The new style of noninvasive but deeply revealing detection—call them “pinpoint searches”—will require rapid adjustments in both legal rules and social mores.Jeff Goldstein is unconcerned, because he agrees with David Brin that the possibility for micro-enforcement will create a groundswell of support for changing the laws in question:
Brin believes a world of more perfect enforcement will create democratic pressure to either eliminate or drastically reduce penalties for “victimless” offenses. What matters, Brin avers, is not what the government knows about you but what it can do to you. To those who fear a world in which, for instance, routine speeding infractions are invariably met with stiff fines, Brin ripostes: “Can’t you trust your fellow citizens to not want that either?”This strikes me as hopelessly optimistic because it ignores the way state authorities actually work. Perhaps in the case of speeding, which virtually everyone does from time to time, the uproar might be sufficient to force a change in the law if the law is enforced uniformly (say, by automatic traffic cameras). But for most of the laws we’re talking about, there is ample reason to think the laws will be enforced selectively on targeted individuals and groups. In addition, the authorities use minor infractions like drug possession as leverage to justify arrests that could not otherwise be justified, to motivate testimony from unwilling witnesses, to extract plea bargains from suspects they cannot convict of worse offenses, and so forth. And everyone knows this. It’s standard operating procedure.
The proliferation of laws and regulations that make virtually everyone guilty of something gives state authorities the discretion to punish whomever they want, whenever they want. This is a problem already, and technology that eases the detection of every little infraction will only exacerbate it.
