A Message to Our Customers

Consider the various ways to police crime:

1: Before the fact, preemptively. Active surveillance and-or entrapment. Widely criticized.

2. After the fact, forensic analysis. Previously, physical evidence collected, warrants for documents. In digital realm, foiled by cryptography. Attempts by government to restore status quo to pre-digital capabilities widely criticized.

3. Compulsion. Prosecutors lean hard on individuals with digital evidence to turn over materials. Runs afoul of 5th amendment and civil libertarians.

At least for many types of crime, especially white collar crime, this leaves the authorities almost no recourse. Your politicians can communicate securely with their paymasters, and receive untraceable payments over bitcoin. Although you may find HUMINT witnesses who can give you probable cause, there may be no way to obtain real evidence.

The Silk Road founder was only caught because of active surveillance, literally caught him with his computer unlocked. This would be like waiting for the San Bernardino killers to unlock their iPhone, and them seizing it before the auto-timer relocked the screen. Not exactly possible for all types of crimes.

Is active physical surveillance of suspects by the state any less creepy than digital warrants?

(guess answer: iOS needs to be signed. So what they are really asking of Apple is to sign a lobotomized iOS image...)

Because Freedom Markets(tm), booyah!

Society can bumble along just fine without corporations. Corporations serve society.

Take away society, with its culture, laws, rules, regulations, courts, people, economy, markets, capital, etc, there can be no corporations.

The Shareholder Fallacy http://www.salon.com/2012/04/04/the_shareholder_fallacy/

Historically, corporations were understood to be responsible to a complex web of constituencies, including employees, communities, society at large, suppliers and shareholders. But in the era of deregulation, the interests of shareholders began to trump all the others. How can we get corporations to recognize their responsibilities beyond this narrow focus? It begins in remembering that the philosophy of putting shareholder profits over all else is a matter of ideology which is not grounded in American law or tradition. In fact, it is no more than a dangerous fad.

The Myth of Profit Maximizing

“It is literally – literally – malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it legally can to maximize its profits. That’s a corporation’s duty to its shareholders.”

Since this sentiment is so familiar, it may come as a surprise that it is factually incorrect: In reality, there is nothing in any U.S. statute, federal or state, that requires corporations to maximize their profits. More surprising still is that, in this instance, the untruth was not uttered as propaganda by a corporate lobbyist but presented as a fact of life by one of the leading lights of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, Sen. Al Franken. Considering its source, Franken’s statement says less about the nature of a U.S. business corporation’s legal obligations – about which it simply misses the boat – than it does about the point to which laissez-faire ideology has wormed its way into the American mind.