This from Wired this morning:
Five workers at the Internal Revenue Service’s Fresno, California, return processing center were charged Monday with computer fraud and unauthorized access to tax return information for allegedly peeking into taxpayers’ files for their own purposes.
After I get over my normal displeasure with “evil government” spying, invading our privacy and the like, I have to ask: wait, they couldn’t do this before?
But the trick here is intent - the great vaguery of law. The IRS can look at your files for IRS purposes, but not for individual employee purposes. Quantifying that must be at least a little tricky.
I thought this bit from assistant U.S. attorney Mark McKoen was also intersting:
The IRS has a method for looking for unauthorized access, and it keeps audit trails, and occasionally it will pump out information about who’s done what.
Now this sounds more like the IRS we know and love: their methods, audit trails and other tactics for finding fraud lead to justice being done “occasionally.” Thankfully, as inefficient as they are at prosecuting their own employees - they should have just as much trouble going after (non) taxpayers.
I have always been amazed at the ideas of criminal intent and conspiracy to commit a crime. Until an actual trespass or injury has occurred, these two things amount to the prosecution of thought crimes. I don’t care how close a person came to committing a crime, nor how seriously he intended to carry it out. If he doesn’t follow through (at least part way, to the point of injury or trespass) then the crime did not exist anywhere other than in his head.
“I have always been amazed at the ideas of criminal intent and conspiracy to commit a crime. Until an actual trespass or injury has occurred, these two things amount to the prosecution of thought crimes.”
Are you suggesting that unauthorized access to one’s tax files is a thought crime? If so, I have to disagree. The act of accessing the file in itself is an improper use of governmental power, violating the privacy of the taxpayer.
Ike,
I agree with you. However, I have been pondering intent a little and led to wonder about something like accidentally driving a car into an old lady and intending to drive a car into an old lady. I have no idea how to reconcile this with the idea that we cannot/should not judge intent.
Colin,
A free market based justice system (which I am assuming you are considering to some extent) would be concerned with incentives and retribution, not punishment as we know it. The incentives would take the form of both positive (discounts on insurance for safe individuals) and negative (payment for damages caused). In my opinion, if the damage to the lady you ran into is the same either way, it doesn’t matter whether you meant to or not. You are responsible for your actions when they affect the property of others, even when they are accidental. The reason is that even an accident is one of two things:
1) Negligence, you acted in a way which any reasonable person would know puts others at risk of injury (personal or property), but you didn’t necessarily want to hurt anybody.
or
2) Risk, you acted reasonably but knowing that your action carries risks which you implicitly accept responsibility for. When you choose to get in your car and drive, you know it is possible that you may lose control and hit someone. If you do not accept this risk, you need to choose not to drive.
Chris A,
What I am saying is that seeing the information in your tax returns cannot be immoral if you did not acquire the tax returns immorally and are not under contractual obligation to avoid seeing the info. If you work at the IRS processing tax returns then you have to be able to see the returns that were given to you for processing. If you gain unauthorized access to the files (they are files which were not given to you for processing) then you are trespassing, that is a crime and a moral wrong. There is no need for the ambiguousness of “intent” here. If they were given to you for processing, but you use the information to injure another (identity theft, blackmail, etc) then that too is immoral and criminal. Adding intent into the mix simply takes something concrete in the justice system and makes it subjective to the will of a judge because it cannot be proven, disproven or even clearly defined.
I can agree with that.
Ike, in other words, intent can be removed from the equation in a free-market based system because that system is actually about quantification. Unless/until intent can be actually quantified (and articulated materially) then we most only go with what is provable (the result, damage, etc…).
My point really comes down to private property as the basis for all justice. How is private property affected by the actions of others, how can we maximize the preservation of private property rights and minimize private property violations? As usual, the government solution ends up creating as many problems as it solves (war on drugs, abuse of power, arbitrary rulings, corrupt judges/cops). No system created by man can be perfect or free from corruption and unintended consequences, but the system which arises out of voluntary association will naturally preserve private property rights the best. Any system created by the government, which has perverse incentives built into it by it’s own nature, will have perverse results.