A Times Editorial

Getting away with crime

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 28, 2000

The Violence Policy Center, an emerging force in the gun control movement, lost its Web site for three days last week to unknown hijackers who boasted profanely on screen of their success.

That was bad.

But not as bad as the FBI's disinclination to do anything about it. Because the organization wasn't out $5,000 or more, an agent explained, no formal investigation would ensue and no arrests would be made.

As a nonprofit organization that sells nothing over the Internet, the Center lost nothing it could put on a balance sheet except the several days' worth of staff time it took to get back online.

In a more important sense, however, the damage was incalculable. The Center's freedom of speech was trashed by cyborterrorists intent on silencing its voice. So were the privacy rights of citizens who thought they were e-mailing the Violence Policy Center, and whose names and identifiers are presumably now being circulated among extremist opponents of gun control. Worse, all like-minded thugs are now on notice that they really can get away with it. As the center's Web master put it, "For people who are interested in hacking nonprofits, it's basically a get-out-of-jail-free card."

The $5,000 factor, a Justice Department policy of long standing, is questionable even as applied to strictly economic crimes, for it implies that the law protects only those who are prosperous enough to lose a lot. When the effect of the offense is to violate civil rights, no less so than if some blackshirted hoodlums had broken up a public meeting, a dollar threshhold is not merely inappropriate. It is indefensible.

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