I don't believe in progress, so I guess that settles that. I think that societies are constantly adapting and people are much the same as they always have been. We are living in a nice time where complexity of our society allows for good sanitation, delivery of food from half-way around the world to off-set local production problems and seasonal shortages, and modern medicine is paid for by the fossil fuels which are causing global warming.

So I guess I am probably as cynical as they get.

The thing though is that within the article there is a great deal of honest discourse, but you can't put all the supporting data into it in that format. The fact is that we have a society where all the rhetoric about rule of law and a government of laws aside, the people expect the government to prosecute people they have been told are "bad guys" and so you get:[1]

1) Lori Drew prosecuted for hacking and by hacking I mean violating the terms of service of a web site. Her conviction was later set aside on vagueness grounds.

2) Jeff Skilling prosecuted for honest services fraud under a standard that would make viewing HN from work a federal felony. His conviction for honest services fraud was set aside by the Supreme Court on vagueness grounds.

3) Daniel Hurwitz prosecuted because he knew or should have known that there was a statistical likelihood that at least some of his pain patients were selling narcotics from their prescriptions on the street. Hurwitz was following general medical consensus regarding medically appropriate prescriptions for chronic pain as well as the DEA's guidance. He was convicted, won a right to a new trial, and was convicted a second time for a smaller number of charges.

4) You also see federal entrapment of Randy Weaver for firearms violations (it is undisputed that Weaver would not have violated the law but for the repeated and prolonged insistence of a government informant paid to get convictions). Weaver may not be a good guy but neither is Skilling. This sort of thing, as well as additional problems with the case going forward (bad advice from lawyers, incorrect statements by a judge, etc) set up the tragedy at Ruby Ridge and FBI conduct so egregious that a man who shot and killed an FBI agent won a significant settlement from the government.[2]

These patterns have been building since Reagan was in office.[3]

The real problem here is breaking through the social consensus that we could never do what China does despite the fact that our civil liberties are degrading and the basic infrastructure is in place for those exact sorts of abuses. Indeed the only real difference is in degree, not in kind.

I am reminded of Karl Doenitz's thoughts on the lessons from Nazi Germany. Doenitz, the architect of the U-boat war, was the one who lead the Third Reich from Hitler's suicide to the surrender. He said that the primary lesson one should draw from Nazi Germany was on the importance of a robust tradition of civil liberties.[4] (The fact that this is a systemic argument I think avoids Godwin's Law and puts this simply in the domain of history discussion.) The upshot is really that the problem that lead to the rise of the Nazis was not caused by bad people as we are lead to believe but rather by systemic deficiencies in German government before their rise to power. It's worth noting also that at the outset of WWI, the Kaiser Wilhelm stated that no civilized nation does not carefully rein in their press (responding to Serbian statements that freedom of the press prevented them from telling the press not to celebrate Archduke Ferdinand's death).

[1] see "Three Felonies a Day: How Feds Target the Innocent" by EFF/ACLU veteran Harvey Silverglate. He covers the Hurwitz and Skilling cases, though the book was published before the Supreme Court ruled on the honest services fraud statute.

[2] See "No More Wacos" by Kopel and Blackman.

[3] Ibid. The authors blame Waco and Ruby Ridge largely on the militarization of law enforcement under Reagan and Clinton, and the drug exception to Posse Comitatus under Reagan.

[4] See "Ten Years and Twenty Days" by Karl Doenitz.