Obligatory Ayn Rand quote (via Dr. Ferris, in Atlas Shrugged):
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt."
My personal theory of how this situation came about, however, could be called the "Walker, Texas Ranger" explanation. I think some lawmakers/enforcers turn vigilante when they are convinced a would-be criminal has gotten away with some potentially-criminal act because of how the law is written, so they seek to change the law.
As hackers, I assume we all have a lot of experience with [computer] code, and we're aware that a small change "here" can have unexpected side-effects "there." I know that when I learned about SML, Lisp, and functional programming without "side effects" I was blown away that it was possible to formally prove the execution of some functions. In other words, it is possible to write good, clean, predictable code.
Nothing like that exists for legal code, however. It's a tangled mass of declarative assertions, nested dependencies, GOTO statements, (naive) version control, and namespaces. A vigilante action to alter some part of the code essentially has unpredictable consequences for other parts of the code.
The changes couldn't be measured if you wanted. In a management sense, the project is totally out of control. Big surprise, then, that private enforcement and prisons are a growth industry. Some people see this for what it is: an opportunity. Just make sure you're an investor instead of a "customer."
The cases cited in the story are more in line with bureaucrats maintaining budget. By that I mean you have an agency that needs to justify their budget of X dollars with Y convictions to show for it. It's hard to imagine any of the agents mentioned being much concerned about orchids. It's easy to imagine them being concerned about their careers.
Whatever the motivations of the agents referred to in the article, it is still the case that "inappropriate" laws were applied to (presumably) non-criminal activity. It's just speculation on my part, but my theory had to do with those how those laws came to exist.
Once the laws exist, then it's just a matter of any agent sufficiently familiar with those laws to apply them. By that point, it doesn't need to be vigilante activity. An agent with only the best intentions can end up causing harm (i.e. convert a free citizen into a criminal) simply because the laws are flawed.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt."
My personal theory of how this situation came about, however, could be called the "Walker, Texas Ranger" explanation. I think some lawmakers/enforcers turn vigilante when they are convinced a would-be criminal has gotten away with some potentially-criminal act because of how the law is written, so they seek to change the law.
As hackers, I assume we all have a lot of experience with [computer] code, and we're aware that a small change "here" can have unexpected side-effects "there." I know that when I learned about SML, Lisp, and functional programming without "side effects" I was blown away that it was possible to formally prove the execution of some functions. In other words, it is possible to write good, clean, predictable code.
Nothing like that exists for legal code, however. It's a tangled mass of declarative assertions, nested dependencies, GOTO statements, (naive) version control, and namespaces. A vigilante action to alter some part of the code essentially has unpredictable consequences for other parts of the code.
The changes couldn't be measured if you wanted. In a management sense, the project is totally out of control. Big surprise, then, that private enforcement and prisons are a growth industry. Some people see this for what it is: an opportunity. Just make sure you're an investor instead of a "customer."