We Americans commit (more or less) three felonies a day. It used to be at least three felonies a day when violation of a website’s TOS was a violation of the CFAA (which can land you 25 years). If you’re a little girl, the DA is probably not going to prosecute, even if you were naughty and downloaded a song illegally.

But here’s the thing: Officials (especially sheriffs lately, and their deputies) are big in coveting your land and your wife and your other liquidatable assets. Heck, if you have some loose cash lying around, all of US law enforcement is already looking to find it, locate it and confiscate it via asset forfeiture and if you get in the way of their prize, well they’re sheepdogs, and you’re now a designated wolf.

And so anything you do that might be even slightly illegal is useful to make a case before a judge why you should spend the next 10 / 25 / 75 years locked up in Rikers or Sing Sing. Even if it’s a petty violation of the CFAA, or is so vague they have to invoke conspiracy or espionage laws, which are so intentionally broad and vague that everyone is already guilty of them.

Typically, these kinds of laws are used when a company or industry wants to disappear someone into the justice system. The go to example is the Kim Dotcom raid, which happened January 18, 2012, conspicuously on the same day as the Wikipedia Blackout protesting against SOPA / PIPA (PS: They’re still wanting to lock down the internet, which is why they want to kill Section 230).

Kim Dotcom was hanging in his stately manor in New Zealand when US ICE agents raided his home with representatives of the MPAA and RIAA standing by. He was accused of a shotgun of US law violations, including conspiracy and CFAA violations. The gist of the volley of accusations was that he was enabling mass piracy of assets by big media companies, hence the dudes in suits from the trade orgs. His company MEGAupload hosted a lot of copyrighted content.

Curiously – and this informs why Dotcom is still in New Zealand – MEGAupload had been cooperating with US law enforcement in their own efforts to stop pirates, and piracy rates actually climbed after the shutdown. Similarly, when Backpage was shut down for human trafficking charges (resulting in acquittal, later), human trafficking rates would climb as the victims were forced back to the streets.

(But Then – and this does get into speculation because we don’t have docs, just a lot of evidence – Dotcom had just secured a bunch of deals with hip hop artists and was going to use MEGAupload as a music distribution service that would get singles out for free and promote tours, and the RIAA really did not like this one bit which may be the actual cause of the Dotcom raid, but we can’t absolutely say. The media industry really hates pirates even though they know they’re not that much of a threat, but legitimate competition might be actual cause to send mercenaries in the color of US law enforcement to a foreign nation to raid the home of a rich dude.)

What we can say is US law enforcement will make shit up to lock you away if someone with power thinks you have something it wants, and you might object to them taking it, and they have a long history of just searching people’s histories (online and off) to find something for which to disappear them into the federal and state penal systems. After all, the US has more people (per capita or total) in prison than any other nation in the world, and so it’s easy to get lost in there.

So yeah, you absolutely have secrets to hide.