I don't think it's actually a felony to throw away junk mail that isn't addressed to you after it arrives at your house. The statute is written to address cases where mail is taken from the custody of the US Postal Service; it refers to "authorized depository of mail matter" where other language in the US Code specifically calls out letterboxes and the like. I do not believe your home mailslot qualifies as "an authorized depository". I did some searching and found some support for that belief, but nothing very authoritative (a MetaFilter thread and an eHow article).

Let me just acknowledge right away that this is trivia; the proliferation of strict-liability crimes (and the fact that strict-liability is actually a kind of default in federal law) is a real problem, as is the problem of open-ended legislation where the details are filled in by unelected regulators.

Messing with the mail is a serious offense and charges related to it do apparently sometimes get out of hand.

I'd say its normal and to be expected, and this kind of whining is equivalent to someone writing an article on car crashes and titling it "No One Is Safe".

Civilization and governments are emergent, more or less, and hobbled together by all manner of parts and precedents.

We live in a democracy, or an approximation of one. That means we aren't ruled by an evil cabal, we aren't ruled by some landed elite. We aren't governed by some educated class (you should see some town hall meetings).

We've chosen a democratic process, which means that we've chosen in aggregate to be governed by whoever shows up.

That's horrifying in its own right, but its more-or-less what we asked for.

And what, you were expecting a perfectly oiled, benevolent government from top to bottom with seven nines up-time and great fault tolerance?

Shitty things like this are a cost of civilization. By all means we should try to fix them, but we shouldn't act appalled when we find them, and we certainly shouldn't advocate throwing out the cradle of civilization with the bathwater. (Not that this site necessarily does, but "revolution" is in the URL, and many who point out things like an imperfect justice system do, and civilization smash-and-grab tends to be the M.O. of certain political parties that point to things like this in an attempt to tear down other portions of civilization).

I upvoted the article because I'd like the discussion, but I don't like the sentiment of this article, which is essentially "Civilizations and governments that evolve over hundreds of years get very complex, and you should be afraid, be very afraid."

Enough with the boogeymanning. It's not a good way to open discussion or fix things.

Sex offender registration and housing restrictions are an excellent example. Megan's Law was passed in response to an exceedingly rare crime, and everything we know about child sex abuse suggests that it is a stupid law (most of the time, it is someone close to the child, not a mysterious stranger). The regulations on where sex offenders are allowed to live have resulted in colonies of homeless sex offenders (which can be a parole violation). These laws are almost all ex post facto laws, but the courts are willing to perform all the mental acrobatics necessary to justify their constitutionality. We wind up with stories about 19 year olds who had sex with 17 year olds winding up on the registry, or even guys who urinated in public.

Yet that has been the pattern in American law for my entire life. Someone died because they overdosed on some new drug at a party, and suddenly the drug is illegal. Someone put a high-capacity magazine in a gun and shot dozens of people, and suddenly high-capacity magazines are illegal. Someone bullies a middle schooler on Myspace to the point of suicide, and "online bullying" becomes a crime.

The second problem with these sorts of laws is that they never expire. Legislators are never forced to debate old laws, even if the laws no longer make sense. Cocaine was made illegal because members of Congress were told that black men became unstoppable monsters, more accurate with a pistol, and more prone to attack white women -- and in the century that has followed, nobody has bothered to renew that debate and see if that line of reasoning still makes sense. Virginia recently took a rare step and repealed a law that made it illegal for an unmarried heterosexual couple to live together (though plenty of other moronic laws remain on the books there). Maybe it made sense to make it illegal to dig for arrowheads, but without debating it now, how do we know that it still makes sense?

We should live in a society where no reasonable person has to worry about whether or not they are breaking the law. That means we need our laws to expire periodically, so that we keep debating whether or not they make sense, and that means we need to not just pass laws every time someone happens that we do not like.

Not actually true, lots of laws have sunset provisions built in. LAws are often repealed or overturned. New laws are typically passed because egregious situatiosn occur and there's not prosecutable under existing law. In the meantime, defendants rely on procedrualism as much as prosecutors do.

The growth and complexity of law is a problem, but misrepresenting the situation as people like Silverglate do (without ever explaining the legal philosophy behind how it came to be this way) leaves everyone worse off because they're just as ignorant as before.

The media loves this of course. That's why when government agencies ask for comment ias part of their rulemaking process (which requess for comments are published in the state or federal register, as all pro journalists know), the media hardly ever bothers to mention it ot the public until the deadline for comment sis looming, in order to create a false sense of urgency and an impression ofa government that doesn't give the people time to react to what's being done in their name.

We should live in a society where no reasonable person has to worry about whether or not they are breaking the law. That means we need our laws to expire periodically, so that we keep debating whether or not they make sense, and that means we need to not just pass laws every time someone happens that we do not like.

Suppose the statute on murder expired automatically every 10 years and had to be reauthorized. What makes you think it would not just be expanded every single time the review period came around? Switching out the legislative mechanism isn't going lead to a magical improvement in human psychology.

It would be. But who would expect it wouldn't be? The law against murder is not the issue here. It's all the laws against all the things no one would necessarily even expect to be illegal.

So how about this: A law can be passed with a simple majority but expires after 10 years. A law can be made permanent (in the sense that it doesn't expire, not that it can't be repealed) only if it is passed unanimously in both houses and not passed using a veto override. Obviously then murder can become permanently illegal since that will have 100.00% support. But every decade we have to have a debate about each of the laws that didn't have unanimous support originally, and anything so unimportant that nobody even remembers it can fall off the books before it becomes an anachronism.

I don't see how that's a real problem. Even assuming they can never once pass it unanimously, they're still going to renew it every time rather than allowing murder to become legal. Also, an amendment expanding the definition of murder to nontraditional entities is going to get killed if necessary to save the bill, and if the vote on the clean bill isn't unanimous then there are going to be Congress Critters who have to explain to their constituents why they voted against prohibiting murder.

As I see it the real trouble with this approach is that it encourages Congress to just reauthorize everything without a debate because there are so many laws they don't have time to do their jobs thoroughly. And that's kind of a different problem -- which is already a problem today, since they should be considering whether laws on the books should be repealed on a regular basis regardless.

But if the strongest argument you can make against something is "it might only help a little instead of a lot," it's maybe still the sort of thing we should try.

That's not the argument I'm making. Don't put words in my mouth.

I don't think it will help at all.

I like your counterpoints to what you see as the sentiment of this article, but I just wanted to note that the other word in the URL is "marginal" - it's wordplay with an economic term about generally small changes that deliberately contrasts with the generally harsh word "revolution" - or in other words, perhaps something closer to advocating fixing things as we find them than throwing out the cradle.

Democracy permits all of the above without destorying its own meaning.

Also the statement that "We've chosen a democratic process" is a lie. It simply has been repeated endlessly that people believe it to be true. Tell me when was the time you decided to have democracy. People never had a choice. It was simply imposed and enforced.

Lastly, democracy is not the only means of having a civilization. Whether people like to admit it or not, as much as democracy can be good, it can also be bad.

Actually, the fact of democracy is itself up for a vote. We could ammend the Constitution so as to abolish elections, if there were a consensus to do so. We have a choice.

"Whether people like to admit it or not, as much as democracy can be good, it can also be bad."

I disagree here. Democracy has the capacity for bad, but it has much more capacity for good. To misquote Churchill (or someone else?) "Democracy is the worst thing going, except for the alternative"

I'm curious how you justify this claim. In what meaningful way has anyone chosen a democratic process? I certainly never chose it, and I've never been asked if I approve. I am occasionally given the "opportunity" to vote for one of a few candidates for various political offices, and there are sometimes even referenda, but I have no choice in the fact that this is how our government operates. If this were a dictatorship (as in, a single ruler has all government authority), would you also say that "we've chosen a dictatorship"?

You say that the democratic process is horrifying, and I agree, but I disagree that the people being governed have any role in choosing to be governed by this style of government even if we make the contentious assumption that they actually have a voice in the specific decisions the government makes. The "democratic government" that rules us (here, I'm referring specifically to the United States, but I suspect it holds for all Western democracies) maintains its power through systematic and unapologetic violence against anyone who challenges it, just like any other type of government. Of course, that last sentence is somewhat unnecessary, because that's built into the definition of "government."

I also completely disagree with your claim that flawed governments (and indeed governments at all) are a necessary cost of civilization, but that's a longer story that I may type when I have something other than an iPad. Suffice it to say that I agree that we should try to fix it, but I'm convinced that the only way to do so is from the outside. Because governments are by definition organizations which claim to be the sole legitimate purveyors of violence in a region, and claim to be self-policing, I do not believe it makes any sense to attempt to use the political process itself to change or fix them from the inside.

Your parting characterisation of the article is fairly accurate, but I have to stand in opposition to your disagreement with it. One should be afraid! So many laws so easily broken mean that one's liberty depends on inconsistent detection as much as it does good behaviour. I'm sure many look upon this as a way to give your friendly local police force a certain amount of flexibility when it comes to cracking skulls, but I for one see it in a more menacing light. I would prefer not to have to rely on the capriciousness of law enforcement.

There's a good talk video on YouTube along these lines, about how one should never talk to the police. Here's a transcript: http://bitmote.com/index.php?post/2011/12/13/Why-You-Should-... TL;DR - nothing good will ever come of talking to the police unnecessarily, because if you do, they'll almost certainly be able to find something to get you with.

I'm with you that there's no Cabal running things. The concept though is that we all have done something wrong, so someone who wants to abuse their power can go after us. The IRS going after political enemies is one example.

Now the source leans libertarian, so it has to be taken in context.

I don't think it will be considered paranoid once everything starts to get recorded ALL THE TIME. And I don't think that is so far away.

If the prosecutor or someone powerful doesn't like your speech, they don't censor you, they just find one of the laws you've no doubt broken and threaten to charge you. Either you stop saying the things they don't want said, or they throw the book at you. Or, it can be even more mundane, maybe they just lock you up or ruin your life and let the speech issue go unsaid, but nonetheless communicated.

In a world where everyone is, in fact, a criminal, and criminals have no (or limited) rights, no one has any rights.

While people ignore regulations which have very little practical harm in being ignored, they also ignore some which later turn out to be very harmful. See near the end of: http://dohanews.co/post/53425474389/five-villaggio-trial-def...

Especially the attempt to use the same law to charge defendants with a Felony for violating a website terms of service/use, in one instance creating fake social network profiles. Yet, simultaneously the very same DoJ has a known policy of creating fake web profiles to locate and interact with suspects. Luckily in the case I am aware of the Judge ruled such an application of the law was overly broad.

But the bigger problem is that not enough people care. They buy the bullshit that all these laws and spying are for our own good and safety and security.