I am a long-time Ars reader and subscriber. I am not American, but I always found their articles on various public policy issues to be interesting and fascinating.

One particularly fascinating element is the callousness of the various “legal arguments” used to justify (and enable) various crimes/corruption schemes.

“I didn’t know this was illegal … it’s the fences fault … we sold both voice and data info, so umm it’s legal.”

Motherfuckers, you were selling real-time location of your customers to random thugs. By any real understanding of the term “justice”, you should be locked up for decades with full asset seizure.

No sane person would agree for you to sell their real-time location data to random goons. You know this and you dare to come up with this gibberish?

It’s not even so much the corruption/criminality that is fascinating (things like that happen everywhere), but the arrogance and callousness inherent to their world salad.