“If American criminal law applies to servers in Costa Rica, might authorities in other countries not try to impose their law on servers based in Texas? You might almost bet that will happen, were it legal to bet.” Walter has a good piece in the London Times on the David Carruthers arrest (Jul. 27, Jul. 20).
Walter Olson on Carruthers
“If American criminal law applies to servers in Costa Rica, might authorities in other countries not try to impose their law on servers based in Texas? You might almost bet that will happen, were it legal to bet.” Walter has a good piece in the London Times on the David Carruthers arrest (Jul. 27, Jul. […]
3 Comments
I think the US legal case is not centered on what’s on the servers, though, but on the company’s publicity activities in the US itself.
Whether it should be illegal to inform US residents of offshore gambling opportunities, of course, is a little questionable, but that’s the issue at hand.
Much as I want to blame the government here (and I have in prvious posts), I must admit, as I think about it, that cyber-space makes life difficult when it comes to proper application of laws that were never designed to handle it.
The truth of the matter is that what was done is illegal (the merits of that law are not relevant to this discussion), and at least one of the parties involved was on US soil at the time.
I’m not sure how things should be done – and I’m not really sure anyone else is, either. It’s quite easy to say, “Hey, the servers are somewhere else,” but that makes a mockery of quite a few laws, including many dealing with fraud and theft, so that is unsatisfactory.
I have no solution, but I don’t fel quite as badly about it as I did before.
One thing I haven’t seen in other articles to date, that Mr Olson covers, is the hypocrisy about the taxation issue. Good to see that make it into print finally.
The prosecutors are so desperate they have already played the ‘terror’ card; U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway played it in an interview with The Guardian (UK):
“This is a very large amount of money flowing on an unregulated basis out of the US. Any time that much money’s flowing outside the US, there are concerns about its destination. … We need to check it is not being used for money laundering, drug financing or terrorism. Because it’s flowing out of the country in an unregulated way, we simply don’t know the ultimate destination.”
So, regulate it in the US as it is in the UK, and that money will not be flowing out of the US, instead plenty of it will be flowing into state coffers.
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