If the Feds Are Reading My Blog...

     "Please, please, please erase that post about how to get rich quick," my billing clerk entreated me a year and a half ago, "and stop writing that blog!"
     "Should I stop writing in my blog?" I asked one of my lawyers.
     "Probably," he said.
     "Why?"
     "Because everything you write will be treated as evidence."
     "So what?"
     "It's like giving a deposition, only the prosecutors don't even have to ask questions."
     "Good," I said.  "The feds can treat it like free discovery."
     Discovery, in its legal definition, refers to the process by which opposing parties in a lawsuit seek to obtain adverse information about the other party, information that can advance their own cause.  In the case of the feds, they'd be scouring my blog for an admission from me that I committed a crime, that I knowingly deceived Medicare in order to "make millions."
     "If the feds are reading your blog, who knows what they'll make of it," the lawyer went on.
     "There isn't anything in my blog, or in my life, to attack."
     "Nevertheless, you don't want to tell them anything you don't have to tell them," the lawyer went on.
     "Don't I?  You lawyers put gags on clients like me before we're even forced to sign gag clauses."
     "I'm just trying to protect you."
     "But what if I didn't do anything wrong?"
     "It doesn't matter," he said.  "They'll find something."
     "What if there isn't anything?"
     "They'll invent something."
     "That's absurd!"
     "I've seen it happen."
     "But--what about the truth?"
     He laughed, not heartily, nor with exasperation, but as though my assumption that truth should figure here or anywhere, was pure naiveté.
     "How can they find something if it isn't there?"
     "You'd be surprised how they'll twist what you write, making it say the exact opposite of what you meant."
     "That's insane."
     "Don't forget," he reminded me, "I used to be a government prosecutor."
     Was he proud, or ashamed?  Had he twisted the truth, in his prosecutorial days, to give the government even more of an edge?  Many defense lawyers used to be prosecutors.  They say it's where they got their training wheels.  Then they ride to "the other side," defending people like me.  They say the experience has given them insight into how prosecutorial minds work.
     What they learn is how to mollify prosecutors, because there isn't much "law" on the side of the defendant.  Mollifying prosecutors requires money.  The defendant, scared out of his or her wits by having been ensnared in federal judicial nets, whether or not a crime might be implicated, wants to be untangled as soon as possible.  Disentanglement is accomplished by paying a settlement fee.
     The settlement fee is an informal tax, the same kind that powerful people have extorted from the weak throughout human history.  It's what you pay to stop a bully from bullying.  It's the big guy telling you he'll beat you up if you don't turn over your peanut butter and jelly sandwich in second grade.  Can I afford to be beaten up?  Is my peanut butter jelly sandwich big enough?  Is the bully going grab it from me anyway, after he beats me up?
     We haven't graduated far past feudal solutions to the problem of the bully.  The peasants were indentured servants who turned over their grain to the lords, cheese makers sent their their milk to fiefdom stewards, shoemakers gave the prosecutors--I mean, the feudal lords--their shoes, their pots and pans, their meat, their eggs, their firewood, all on demand.  The second-grader gives up his sandwich, the poor little guy shouting, "Mercy!" when he can't stand the pain of having his arm twisted to the breaking-point.
     "Mercy!" I want to shout.  "Take my wallet, take my house, take anything but my children!  Just leave me alone!"  But it rankles, it's wrong.  No, no, no!--I think.  I won't shout mercy.
     The American Revolution was about standing up to bullies, not paying those absurd taxes, not believing in the nobility of the ruling class, not cowering when the big guys made their threats.  We Americans demanded justice back then, and we finally exacted our freedom from that bloated British government.  What's happened to us?  Have we turned into a country of wusses?
     The problem with bullies and land stewards and the lords of fiefdoms and the British monarchy in 1775 and our American federal prosecutors today, is that they all believe, religion or not, in their "divine right" to steal what isn't theirs.  If we don't stand up to them, they'll keep coming back.
      Here they come again.  They're hovering over me, they're twisting my arm, they're positioned to steal more stuff.  "Say mercy," they're growling.  "Say it, say it!"  They're punching me where it most hurts, they're ripping open my backpack, scattering my books and blog pages, seizing my tofu sandwich, they're going to take, take, take, and if I don't resist I'll never get to eat my own lunch again.
     "Should I stop writing in my blog?"  I asked my second lawyer.
     "I can't keep you from doing it," he answered.
     "Yeah, free speech and all that."
     "It's up to you."
     "But what would you do?"
     "I wouldn't write it."
     He paused, and I thought in the pause there was a kind of blessing.  His hands have bent tied--he's said this many times.  Maybe I'll do something on the back end, maybe not.
     "It's your decision.  You have the right to say whatever you want.  Just make sure it's the truth."
     "I will," I said.
     "And be careful," he added, looking around the conference room, and it occurred to me he might be scanning the place for electronic bugs.  "Be careful."