Image Credit: Robert Couse-Baker

In the old days, when powerful figures abused their authority in the community, there was a simple way for the community to stop them: form an angry mob. When King John raised taxes, an angry mob of Merry Men hung out in Sherwood Forest robbing the tax collectors. Later, an angry mob of nobles made him sign the Magna Carta and began the system of law we know today. Citizens of Boston formed angry mobs that tarred and feathered abusive British authorities and paved the way for the American revolution.

All that an angry mob needed was some pitchfoks, a few muskets, and some tar and feathers and they were good to go.

These days, you don’t seem to see angry mobs anymore–even when they’re needed. After all, Britain banned firearms years ago.  I remember being shocked in London when I saw a billboard with a picture of a revolver and a tips hotline asking ‘Have you seen one?’.  Britains have replaced self-defense with a network of spy cameras.  The same thing is happening in parts of the United States.

A recent British case shows how deeply into someone’s life the modern Big Brother can delve:

Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the neighborhood school, local officials here began a covert surveillance operation. They obtained her telephone billing records. And for more than three weeks in 2008, an officer from the Poole education department secretly followed her, noting on a log the movements of the “female and three children” and the “target vehicle” (that would be Ms. Paton, her daughters and their car).

It turned out that Ms. Paton had broken no rules.

Worse, these abuses were allowed under local law.

Under a law enacted in 2000 to regulate surveillance powers, it is legal for localities to follow residents secretly. Local governments regularly use these surveillance powers — which they “self-authorize,” without oversight from judges or law enforcement officers — to investigate malfeasance like illegally dumping industrial waste, loan-sharking and falsely claiming welfare benefits.

But they also use them to investigate reports of noise pollution and people who do not clean up their dogs’ waste. Local governments use them to catch people who fail to recycle, people who put their trash out too early, people who sell fireworks without licenses, people whose dogs bark too loudly and people who illegally operate taxicabs.

There used to be a simpler solution of someone creepy was stalking you. You called up your neighbors, they got their shotguns and some torches and BOOM. Angry mob justice.

There has been a great deal of uninformed debate over government ‘death panels’ that decide who gets life saving medical treatment.  It turns out that we already have death panels, and they are operated by private insurance groups.  There are hundreds of anecdotes, but I’ll use this one:

I regularly receive heartbreaking e-mails from readers simultaneously combating the predations of disease and insurers. One correspondent, Linda, told me how she had been diagnosed earlier this year with abdominal and bladder cancer — leading to battles with her insurance company.

“I will never forget standing outside the chemo treatment room knowing that the medication needed to save my life was only a few feet away, but that because I had private insurance it wasn’t available to me,” Linda wrote. “I read a comment from someone saying that they didn’t want a faceless government bureaucrat deciding if they would or would not get treatment. Well, a faceless bureaucrat from my private insurance made the decision that I wouldn’t get treatment and that I wasn’t worth saving.”

There is no effective legal recourse.  The insurance companies have armies of lawyers; the ill have already spent all their money on the bills the insurance company was supposed to pay.  There’s even a cute little name for denying people life-saving treatment to make money: it’s called ‘rescission’.

But one thing that sick people have that armies of lawyers don’t are friends. Friends with torches and pitchforks…

This case made me so angry I almost got sick to my stomach.

Arar, a Canadian telecommunications engineer, was detained during a 2002 layover in New York based on mistaken suspicions that he had ties to Al Qaeda. After holding him for two weeks, American officials shipped him off to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and tortured.

Arar later sued, and was told that he had no recourse in American courts to collect damages against his assailants.  He was awarded $11 million by the Canadian courts, who have a higher sense of justice.  He should spend some of his money finding the people who kidnapped him.

Or he could spread the wealth around to his friends and neighbors, who could return the favor by hogtying the American officials who shipped Arar off to be tortured, packing them in shipping containers, and sending them to Syria to enjoy a little taste of the judicial system there…

Tom Traina wrote about this case, in which two prosecutors framed two innocent men for murder.  He did so with much more restraint than I’m about to.

In July 1977, retired police captain John Schweer was shot and killed while working as a night watchman at an Oldsmobile dealership in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Two teenagers, Curtis McGhee and Terry Harrington, were convicted of the murder based on evidence they allege was knowingly fabricated by prosecutors.

In general, prosecutors are protected against suit by prosecutorial immunity.  In this case, however,

[F]ortunately for McGhee and Harrington, they did something on which the law is not completely clear — they didn’t just present the evidence at trial, but also helped gather it.

The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether or not the two men, who spent 25 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit, can sue.

These two men spent 25 years in prison because of the actions of two unethical prosecutors.  Suppose a madman had, instead, locked these two men up in his basement for 25 years.  We would be ranting about what a heinous crime it was.  What the prosecutors did is, of course, not equivalent to locking someone up in a basement.

It’s worse.

These men are figures of authority.  They are vested with tremendous power, and with that power comes greater responsibility.  To steal 25 years of a man’s life is the work of a depraved and evil man; to enact that theft under the mantle of justice is unspeakable.

Full justice here is probably impossible.  Sometimes you have to take what you can get. Hopefully, what these two can get is a big group of friends, neighbors and townspeople together…

Here’s a case that goes beyond an extreme violation of one man’s rights and attacks the very foundations of our nation.

After 9/11, John Yoo, of torture memo fame, issued another memo that came dangerously close to authorizing martial law in the free nation of the United States.

At one point, the memo says, the U.S. military could be used for “targeting and destroying” a hijacked airline or “attacking civilian targets, such as apartment buildings, offices or ships where suspected terrorists were thought to be.” At another point, the memo advices: “Military action might encompass making arrests, seizing documents or other property, searching persons or places or keeping them under surveillance, intercepting electronic or wireless communications, setting up roadblocks, interviewing witnesses or searching for suspects.”

It is chilling to consider how close we came to destroying the fundamentals of our democracy in the months and years after 9/11.  When the government calls in the military to raid homes and offices, then we, as a free nation, are done.  Finished.  It is time for every able citizen to grab your constitution and your gun and run to the hills (thereby forming militias and fulfilling the Founding Father’s original conception of the 2^nd Amendment). Militia, by the way, is fancy legal talk for “angry mob.”

People should nearly always seek to live together in peace and harmony.  Most of the time, the structures of our societies help us to do that.  A gun is not an everyday necessity; it is something you keep locked away as grim insurance against the most extreme possibilities life has to offer.  There are those few rare situations where civilization breaks down.

That’s when it pays to have friends.

Or a system of justice that actually holds people in positions of power accountable for their abuses.