The US justice system has gone mad.
In the last hour, I’ve read about two outrageous incursions by the long arm of US law, and law enforcement, into the lives of its citizens.
By comparison with the second case (below), the first story I encountered seems almost trivial. Still, but briefly . . .
. . . the state of New Jersey has subpoenaed the source code and documentation for an award winning program written by a group of MIT students. No charges have been laid but as the Wired article notes there are hints of serious consequences that might still come to pass. Hints of consequences for having written a proof of concept program that made no money for anyone.
Although it’s not explained well in the Wired article, the program in question was designed to offer an alternative to having ads on web sites, i.e. instead of having ads, a site would employ the site visitor’s machine to mine Bitcoins. Presumably, safeguards would be put in place to allow the visitor to ‘free’ him or herself from Bitcoin mining slavery simply by leaving the site or by asking for his/her permission in the first place - do banner ads ask for your permission to use your machine’s CPU? In any case, it was just a proof of concept. The program was not (yet) able to work.
Beyond the hints of possible charges, though, is the cost of the students ‘defending’ themselves and their work from the government. And that’s what is frightening to me. Although in this case, there is no lack of support to help with the ‘defence’ (with both MIT and the Electronic Frontier Foundation taking up the cause), what about a less well-connected ‘accused’? Or if it had been involving a less glamorous cause? Scary. A time-honoured way to harass whoever the government wishes to stifle, but now applied to information and ‘the electronic frontier’.
But it is the second case is the one that is absolutely outrageous. Here is the relevant New York Times article. In this case, a mother is going to prison for ordering online, and then administering to her 16-yo daughter, the miscarriage inducing drugs “mifepristone (formerly called RU-486) and misoprostol, [medications that] have been available from a doctor with a prescription in the United States since 2000 and are used around the world to induce miscarriage.”
As the NYT story details, for financial and other ‘real-life’ reasons, the mother felt she had no other way to obtain an abortion for her daughter (her constitutional right). BTW, this was early in the first trimester when the risk, if any, of using RU-486 is very small. It’s so small in fact, that it’s perfectly legal and acceptable so long as it’s done via a doctor’s prescription. But that requires finances and a car . . . (read the article).
In any case, when the daughter started bleeding after taking the drugs, they went to the hospital and, instead of saying she was having a spontaneous miscarriage (which is indistinguishable from the effect of RU-486 both in symptoms and risk, and which would have given the hospital no reason to stick its nose into anything), they told the truth. And now this woman is going to jail. For nine to eighteen months. For what? Read the article for the revolting rationalization given by the DA and the judge (basically for ‘endangering her daughter’ and ‘for practicing medicine without a license’.). I suggest also reading the comments. The only good news in all this is that NYT readers (at least) see this for what it is: a justice system gone mad.
ETA: As many commenters have asked, will the DA now go out and prosecute all the men who ordered Viagra online and who thus also practiced medicine without a license?