RICO Now Applies to Internet Organizations

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization.

Which in English means that if one member of a criminal organization such as the Mob, a Chicago street gang, or a drug cartel, is captured and tried, he or she can be tried for every crime committed by the organizations members.

That means that David Ray Camez, who was already serving a seven year sentence for fraud, is now going to be charged for every crime committed on Carder.su. Carder.su is a criminal Craig's list where vendors can sell illegal hacking or counterfeiting equipment as well as stolen credit card information on the website.

For more information on Camez's situation and RICO read THIS!

What I want to talk about after reading this article is how it pertains to the average Internet user and your right to be anonymous on the Web. Courts now have precedent to try any party on an illegal website. That includes but is not limited to any website used for illegal downloads, the silk road, and mirroring websites. That means if you use the website, you are a criminal because you are actively participating in the organizations's criminal activities. It is my experience that the United States government does not prefer to deal with anonymous criminals. Furthermore, I doubt that credible websites would want their users to be anonymous.

Here is what I'm thinking. Take ebay for example. Suppose a rouge group of ebay users begin to secretly use the website's hosting to buy and sell drugs. Ebay could then technically be held responsible for their actions and be tried in US courts under RICO.

 Now I am purely speculating here, but that could mean that we soon could see a further push by websites to get users to sign up and verify or link their accounts using credible information. We have already seen this happening with Google. Google is doing a fantastic (some may call it annoying) job of ensuring that all of their user's profiles are linked together. It is very difficult to be anonymous and using a google account at the same time. Of course, there are work arounds to these google profile requirements, but at this point, it is normally easier to just make a real account than to deal with all of the hassle of remaining anonymous to use YouTube.

Thus, this evolves into yet another case of the government possibly intruding on our nation's privacy. However it also has other important effects. Forcing everyone to be "registered" on the Internet could pave the way for new Internet copyright legislation. If you have to post under a constant alias or user name on the Internet, in theory, it would be quite easy to sort out the thousands of copyright disputes currently going on because of content posted on the Internet.

Or it could have a much darker effect. Because of the constant fear of being sued for copyright, new Internet legislation could seriously cripple creativity and content posted to the Internet. Websites like 4Chan, Tumblr, and Reddit would lose much of their content and possibly collapse upon themselves due to the lack of content.

Either way, U'm only speculating. So none of this could happen, or all of it could. We will have to wait and see.