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It's not quite that easy, unfortunately. The vast majority of us, just by sheer ignorance of the contents of the enormous Federal Register, unknowingly commit a
by daxorid 9y ago
It's not quite that easy, unfortunately. The vast majority of us, just by sheer ignorance of the contents of the enormous Federal Register, unknowingly commit at least a few federal felonies per year.
If the Feds want you in prison, they'll find a way.
- Clubber 9y agoThis is absolutely correct. There are shelves and shelves of laws that no one really knows. If someone wants to go after you, it won't take much research.
- DanBC 9y agoHe didn't accidentally defraud people. He knew exactly what he was doing.
- Clubber 9y agoYes, but that's not the point. The point is the US government has many ways of throwing people in jail it doesn't like, including me or you. That's doesn't equate with a free society.
- DanBC 9y agoIt doesn't seem relevant to the thread, where he knowingly and willingly engaged in a massive theft-related offence against large numbers of people. That's not "the government is out to get you", that's "the government punishes crooks".
- s73v3r_ 9y agoNeither does being perfectly free to defraud investors.
- ryanlol 9y agoDid anyone actually suggest that anywhere here?
- dragonwriter 9y ago> The vast majority of us, just by sheer ignorance of the contents of the enormous Federal Register, unknowingly commit at least a few federal felonies per year. Federal felonies (and federal crimes more generally) are defined by the US Code, and almost entirely Title 18 of that Code, not the Federal Register. The Federal Register is the regular publication of regulatory process documents, most of which is notices and procedural background information; the operational material from the Federal Register is codified in, for the most part, the Code of Federal Regulations (which is much smaller than the Federal Register; while not a perfect analogy, you could think of the Federal Register as the Git repository for the Code of Federal Regulations, with commit messages that usually far exceed the size of code changes.) The CFR itself is occasionally relevant to defining the parameters of crimes (not all of which are felonies), in that in certain cases Congress has made violation of certain regulatory orders criminal. But it's only a very small share of the CFR (itself much smaller than the Federal Register) that is relevant to that.