This blog is about a change in my opinion.
I have considered the actions of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden to be treasonous. I have changed my mind.
The revelations by Congressman Darrell Issa that the Democratic Party and President Obama had captured the IRS for his own malicious and self-serving purposes have led me to consider the IRS behaviour the greatest political crime in my lifetime.
It is necessary to understand four attributes of the IRS to fathom the magnitude of this crime.
The IRS has more power over individuals than any other agency in government. The IRS can close a business without prior legal processes, it can seize an individual's assets with no advanced legal procedure as protection. The IRS has the power to interact with any citizen without a prior legal selection process, such as evidence. The IRS is the agency that we depend on to generate the necessary trust to encourage the citizenry to pay its individual taxes, honestly.
The IRS is distinct and unique in all of these aspects. When the IRS becames a tool of the Democratic Party and a malicious president it has permanently stained its reputation. The IRS should be abolished and re-formed. Control of the IRS by the party in power is the greatest violation of trust imaginable.
In trying to think about my response to this horrible event I considered every personal action available to me. My friends made it clear the IRS would not respond to political defiance. Instead the IRS would use its awesome powers to punish me individually.
The solution is to follow in the footsteps of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden: to hack the IRS and make public the internal documents that show the malice of the criminal actors inside the IRS.
That is why I have changed my mind about Manning and Snowden. They have shown all of us that there is a way to cope with a vicious and out-of-control government. The Second Amendment is not the modern tool to protect us. It is hacking. Hacking is our Second Amendment right.
Can I encourage anyone with the skills to hack the IRS? If someone does the hacking, don't waste your time on looking into the top four people. They communicated verbally. Look for the people around them who may have sent e-mails to their friends commenting about the crime going on in their offices.
To my knowledge it is not yet illegal to encourage hacking. It may be illegal to pay someone for hacking. If you have the answers to this legal question please let me know. Let us all know.
Back to Manning and Snowden. Manning released communications between consulates and the State Department. I have seen several such memos before and consider them trivial.
In both cases the names of assets were published and the assets had to be extracted immediately. According to the Bob Gates book this was done successfully. We lost assets but we gained awareness of our government's incompetence and in the case of Snowden the clear overreach of the intelligence community.
Thank you both for showing the way to deal with an out-of-control government.
(You can donate to 'Find the smoking gun fund' here.)