See No Evil: The Case of Alfred Anaya
wired.com
wired.com
What case? Pure hearsay by real but <cooperating> drug traffickers, woven into a skillful tale of bespoke swimming pools, deliberately painting him as a drug dealer in the jury's minds. The intimidation charge, btw., is explained: it was needed to discredit the traffickers' initial account of him not being involved. Of course, the true reason for changing their story, i.e. successfully reducing their own sentences, would not have played so well for the prosecutor. The only remotely substantiated 'evidence' against him was that he saw some cash. By that count most bankers ought to be in jail with him.
So we come to the explanation of the glaring discrepancy in the sentencing:
1) His skills were making life difficult for the police, so he had to be <dealt with>, regardless of justice or law. This is why the prosecutor offered to cut sentencing deals with the real traffickers, just to get him.
2) Being innocent and <not cooperating> are the worst crimes in the US of today. The same principle as in Aaron Schwarz case.
Regardless of the details of this case, don't you think that it is just plain wrong that prosecutors can order any 'witness account' they want from most people in their clutches? Years in jail at their discretion is a very powerful inducement, one that must be distorting justice (read framing innocent people) on daily basis.
Had he taken up the offer of a luxury bugged storefront with all the equipment he wanted, he would now be a respectable, financially secure citizen instead of languishing for over 24 years in jail. What do such extremely diverse outcomes for the same past activities say about the validity of the law and its implementation process?
The only hitch is that his innocent clients who have every right to hide their jewelery and other valuables in their own car would all have their security knowingly compromised by him.
What does that tell us about the authorities, their attitude towards our privacy rights, and the moral values they expect and enforce?
I guess justice is served and we call sleep better at night? Is "war on drugs" a magic formula which can be used to justify anything, just like "war on terror" and "think of the children"?
Either way, it saddens me to know that the instigators, aggressors, and profiteers of this "war" will never spend a day in prison.
People watch to much TV. They think the justice system is fair based on the fact that Law and Order wraps up the case in 45 minutes and the perp always confesses. It doesn't work like that. Even from the article the DA takes great joy in sending people to prison. If you are in front of him your innocence is not taken into account. He's trying to send you to prison for as long as possible.
On the other hand, he had to of known what was going on. You start down the path of shady, it's just going to get darker. I can't say I blame him or I wouldn't do the same if I had a passion for such things, but still he had to of known the risk. I don't believe in his sentence however and it really sucks the guys at the top only got half the length he did. There might have been other things involved sure, but stil a sentence like that is pretty staggering and life changing.
It's not about whether it could be created for smothering people. If you're a tailor, and someone says to you, "I need a special kind of jacket with a loop like this that I can use to strangle people with,"* and you make that for them, then yes, you are liable when they indeed use it for that purpose! As for who decides whether the creator knew it would be used for an illegal purpose, that would be the jury.
If before there was an internet, a terrorist group approached a technologist and described a network that they required to better organize terror plots, then YES, that person should be held accountable for the uses the group puts it to, even if it eventually has positive consequences as well.
On the other hand, if a person makes and distributes anything, dangerous or not, with a legitimate use case in mind, they should absolutely be held blameless if it is then used by someone else to commit a crime.
*Assuming of course that a "reasonable person" would actually believe the person was indeed going to do that, since it comes across as pretty bizarre...
As an independent contractor he owed it to himself to think through his choices and protect himself more carefully than he did.
That said, he did get hosed by a completely crazy and corrupt system. It's just that I think he should have known better.
Everyone complains about having to pay attorney fees, but in this case it would have saved the guy YEARS in prison. Don't just rely on "well I read on the internet somewhere that if my customer's don't mention drugs explicitly I'm OK"
And even if the attorney gives bad advice, it's still worthwhile. It would have sounded so much better in front a jury if he could have said: "Yes, I was worried I might be breaking the law, so I consulted XYZ attorney and he assured me it was ok. Here's his written opinion and bill"
There's sort of three options about tech facilitating <bad thing>: you hold the people behind the tech responsible, you hold the people behind the tech blameless, or you cherry-pick when they're at fault.
I'd argue that cherry-picking is what we currently do, and that it is troublesome in its inherent double-standards: if I show teenagers how to make pipebombs and they hurt someone, that's on me, but if I write tech manuals for special forces on the same subject, that's okay. If I write software that helps ensure messages are private, that's okay, but if the same software is used to carry child porn, that's awful. If I write software for recording customer information, that's okay, but if I provide it to the government, that's not okay.
Cherry-picking is rubbish in this way, because the same tech--particularly for tools and services!--can be used for both good and harm. It may be difficult to argue for peaceful uses of stealth fighters, but barring a few cases it would seem that all tech is dual-use. We can acknowledge this fact, and pick one extreme or the other.
If we take the view that all tech providers are culpable for the use of their tech, we stifle innovation and retard the pace of development--if the morass of patent claims is bad, consider what happens if every product has to go through a strict liability filter to make sure it can't hurt anyone. We don't even stop the bad uses of tech--we can still be saddened to find that someone has found an illegal use for our tools that simply had never occurred to us.
If we go the other way, and hold tech providers blameless, we don't slow innovation. We simplify the cases against people who do commit crimes, and streamline the justice process. We give up the ability to try and stop the spread of things like traps and weapons and whatnot, and can focus on actually going after the people that use them for ill, or deciding not to waste resources on things that become impractical to enforce.
None of this matters a hill of beans, though, because we seem to be hellbent on a justice system which doesn't even bother to make clear the inscrutable laws with which it will nail you to the wall. Brilliant.
In this particular case, I could see how there's a strong argument that he was. I mean, when he saw the $800k, honestly, he _did_ know it was related to drugs. He made the choice to continue. Should he have been charged as a conspirator and ultimately sentenced to 24 years? Not in my opinion! But he wasn't completely blameless either.
Then anyone who implements a cryptosystem is in legal peril. There is no question that cryptosystems are used by criminals to commit crimes. So far, cryptographers have been able to sleep at night knowing that their work is also used to protect people from criminals and other dangers.
This individuals biggest problem was that he had more than a casual association with people that he could have reasonably suspected were involved in something illegal. If he had stopped having anything to do with the people who had the 800k hidden, he'd be a free man now. If he had tipped off the cops that he saw a car with 800k hidden in a secret compartment, he'd very likely have won the accolades of the entire police department along with buying himself some very welcome immunity from prosecution.
He chose sides and lost.
The bottom line is that you shouldn't have to "choose sides" every time you see something suspicious. Most seemingly suspicious occurences are innocent, and calling the police on someone every time you see one is childish and naive.
I hate to say it, but I find the range of "legal" uses for a hidden compartment in a moving vehicle to be vanishingly small. I'd put them in the same range as legal reasons to wearing a full facemask/helmet in a bank.
This man was prosecuted to intimidate others like him -- other people who might make such modifications to cars. The goal was to ensure that such compartments do not become commonplace. Zimmerman was attacked in the 90s out of an effort to keep email encryption from becoming commonplace. If a technology makes law enforcement more difficult, the creator of that technology should expect to be prosecuted.
Nobody "chose sides" in this case. Anaya is the victim of an vastly overpowered law enforcement system, one that has resulted in the United States having an order of magnitude more prisoners than any other country.
And we've seen the good guys use the same systems to hide from the governments while they leaked these facts.
I would personally be a bit surprised at 800k US Dollars - but it's not completely unlikely that someone would have that kind of cash. Even if they're not dealing/trafficing drugs.
I would also consider that A) Anaya is an master craftsman in his art, hence probably expensive (Even though he doesn't seem ridiculously expensive in the article) B) People with money do use master craftsmen, for what ever reasons they do - maybe it's the work of art - maybe it's because they don't care how much they spend or they want to look "appropriate"
Let's use an example which is not so forgiving and ambiguous:
Handgun manufacturers know that their weapons are designed specifically to kill or wound human beings. Do we punish or fine them for their weapons use in a criminal act? If so, why?
Do we really want to establish a legal and, worse, moral norm that any illegal act will require the prosecution of every "enabler" of that act?
Do you want to wish this on society?
In this case, according to the jury (likely influenced by a prosecution that was superior in quality to the defense, yes), Anaya DID have reason to believe that his product would be used in an illegal act, and therefore he should not have provided it. And indeed, the jury got it right there, because he himself admits that he believed, or at least strongly suspected, that the F150 trap was used for illegal activity.
Again, I'm not saying that the punishment was in any way reasonable; just that the maker of any sort of tool should indeed be held accountable if they provide that tool specifically for illegal use.
Even specific illegal use does a bad job as a metric, considering how arbitrary and unjust many laws considering technology are. What are you going to use a high-density disk for, if not storing downloaded media? Why would ordinary people want CD-Rs, if not for copyright infringement?
If the tool is provided in the conspiratorial sense--"You're having trouble with that bank vault, try this drill!"--I would probably agree with you. But something like this feels very different somehow.
However, I do believe that it should not simply be OK to provide a tool to someone in full knowledge that they will use it to commit a crime. Perhaps more granularity needs to exist in the law for these cases. (Or maybe it even does exist, but was not well applied in this case, possibly due to a poor defense. IANAL.)
Finally, there is the issue of arbitrary and unjust laws concerning technology. I do not disagree with you there at all, but it is a separate issue. It doesn't make sense to say, "It's OK to help people break laws, but only the unjust ones." Instead, the unjust laws themselves should be challenged. Obviously I don't like to see anyone go to jail due to an unjust law, but that doesn't mean that other laws should be distorted to work around it.