Deputizing America

From FEE.org (Aug. 18):

It’s an old Western movie trope. The harassed sheriff needs help against Desperado D. Blackhat and his gang of gunslingers. He goes into the saloon, finds the gambler who was once the most feared crack shot this side of the Pecos, and makes him his deputy. Together, they run Blackhat and his gang out of town. If you thought that type of quick-and-dirty deputizing died with the Wild West, think again.  Government is deputizing people all over the country to do its law-enforcement work. But unlike that gambler, they don’t get the chance to say no.

Take, for instance, FedEx. The delivery company has been indicted by federal prosecutors for not doing the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) job for it. The DEA alleges that FedEx knowingly shipped pharmaceuticals for online pharmacies that were based on invalid prescriptions, because it should have known “the principals, company names, shipping addresses and billing addresses that were initially connected to” a network of pharmacies closed down by the DEA in 2003. As a recent Wall Street Journal editorial summarized:

Translation: FedEx employees should have connected the dots. But if it's so easy, why didn't the DEA do it? The truth is that unmasking the bad guys would have required an extensive metadata analysis of customer data that is not FedEx's job.

The DEA also alleges that FedEx should have known its orders were based on fraudulent prescriptions from visiting the pharmacies’ facilities for inspection. That’s not something a shipping company is set up to do. It is something a law enforcement agency is set up to do, but the DEA didn’t do it. So by its indictment of FedEx, the feds are telling all other delivery firms that they are now forcibly deputized to do the DEA’s job in the War on Drugs. If they don’t play along, they need to show up in court.

Banking regulators have been playing a similar game. Under a campaign known as Operation Choke Point, they have been telling banks that if they don’t investigate their customers for “high-risk” activity, they will be subject to subpoenas and everything that implies. As a result, banks have simply been cutting off links to potentially risky customers on the simple basis of what business they are in. As Department of Justice documents show (which I document extensively in my recent report on the operation), the motivation for Choke Point was the feds’ lack of manpower to investigate the risky businesses themselves. So they deputized the banks to do their job for them. [read more]

Either the gov’t agencies are just plain lazy or they are abusing their power. Or both. Like the author of the article said if this practice is not put in check we might be all deputized. After all if a gov’t agency can do this to a business why not an individual? Welcome to the Collective.