Informers and Chekists

I'm having a hard time keeping up with political and economic news at the moment. I'm barely even conversant with the details of the appropriately named Congressman who performed the Full TSA on Twitter. But I did see this:

Report: 25 percent of U.S. hackers are FBI informants

According to the Guardian, 25 percent of all the hackers in the U.S. are actually informants for the federal government. The reason for that, the U.K. publication reports, citing Eric Corley, the publisher of hacker quarterly 2600, is that hackers have become quite easy to break when they're faced with threats of long prison sentences for their alleged crimes. In fact, Corley told the Guardian that hackers "are rather susceptible to intimidation." So rather than face those long stretches in jail, they secretly provide information to the authorities.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20069635-17/report-25-percent-of-u.s-hackers-are-fbi-informants/#ixzz1ObVDVyG2

Y'know, I'm not generally one to suggest the U.S. is totalitarian or even sliding that way. Despite the various and hideous abuses of the past two administrations, I believe that there is a bright line we've managed to cling to with our fingernails. But they're making it harder and harder for me to see where that line is.

Every American should read Solzhenitsyn (I know Jon is a fan), and every American armed by his government as a function of his job duties should be quizzed on what he is read and beaten about the head with his copy for every wrong answer (his works are quite heavy even in paperback). I myself have read The Gulag Archipelago but I need to go back and dig up his other works.