Clear Your Browser Cache — Be Charged With Obstructing Justice, Even If You Never Knew FBI Was Seeking A Warrant Regarding Your Computer

Juliana DeVries at The Nation provides details of one case and a sketch of the history of the use and abuse of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002). Yes, you could be prosecuted for clearing your browser history if you were under investigation by the FBI, even if you had no knowledge of the existence of the investigation, and yes, it has happened to one or more people in real life. In the case in question, the cab driver was charged with four counts of obstruction of justice, three for lying to the FBI (always a bad idea) regarding the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston Marathon bombing infamy, and one for removing some material from his personal computer that might have associated him with the Tsarnaevs.

It beggars belief that the simple act of clearing your browser cache, something many people do routinely, something about which your intent or state of mind in doing is almost impossible to prove absent independent evidence, could get you sent to jail for decades.

What an era we live in! I doubt our nation's founders would recognize what has become of federal law enforcement as being in any way related to, let alone descended from, the system they created.

Once again, I wonder whether Mr. Godwin's long-valuable wisdom still reflects reality... I keep having a deep-seated inclination to violate Godwin's Law regarding cases like these.

Welcome To Hoover's FBI Reborn

AP via TPM: "FBI: We Faked AP Story To Catch Bomb Suspect But Didn't Spoof Newspaper." How virtuous... your government lies to you only when absolutely necessary. Somewhere in Hell, the shade of John Edgar is surely grinning...

‟Don’t Turn On Your Brother... Turn On Your Brother!″

That used to be merely a bad joke in the Sixties, when the sense of "turn on" mutated from "rebel against your brother" to "get your brother high." But that's not what is happening now in the federal bureaucracy, and not just in the apparatus of the security state (FBI, NSA, CIA, etc.), but also in agencies and departments you would never think of as urging their employees to rat out their coworkers whom they suspect of, well, improbably enough, treason (FDA, USDA, etc.).

Digby bases her post, "This really is Big Brother: the leak nobody's noticed" on a McClatchy article, "Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.." Together, the post and the McClatchy article are among the most deeply frightening things I've read this week, and it's been a week of stuff hitting the fan. Set your coffee down before you read any of it.

(H/T Avedon for the Digby ref. You may not want to inflict this material on any federal employee or contractor via their work email, and I'm not talking about its pr0n content, because there is none. The obscenity is of a different nature, but your friend who works for or contracts for the feral gummint could well get in trouble just for receiving it.)

ADDENDUM: Bryan of Why Now? has a post on a closely related subject.