While excellent advice, that's not the issue that the article is talking about. You can be the most silent, rights knowledgeable person and still get screwed by Federal law.
I'm currently reading a book titled "Three Felonies a Day" which details how the federal criminal system is broken. The book itself unfortunately is a series of anecdotes, rather than a deeper analysis of how we got to this situation. If you can find it at the library, I recommend skimming a few of the stories to get a feel for what's going on.
I'm obviously not a lawyer, but as far as I understand, federal law does not require a "guilty mind" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea), at least not to the same degree that traditional state law requires. In addition, many federal crimes are written very vaguely, sometimes to good effect (handling unforeseen criminal acts, obviously wrong, but not specifically banned by law), but more often to ill effect (yeah, that's fraud!).
Then, finally, there is the issue of the approach federal prosecutors take in pursuing cases, in which the push for convictions is more important than the push for justice. This results in approaches to cases such as "ladder climbing", where you indict the lower rungs of an organization (mayor's aids for example) with the threat of years of jail, and have them plea bargain out to almost nothing in exchange to testify against the person above them. Often, the choice for the person being accused is so obviously one sided that they'll creatively spin their testimony so that innocent behavior suddenly because "fraud" or "obstruction of justice" or similarly vague crimes.
One more sneaky thing that federal prosecutors do is that certain things are crimes, even where not obvious. For instance, lying under oath is obviously a crime (perjury). Lying to a federal officer while not under oath is also a crime (a felony no less).
So basically, federal prosecutors can pin very serious crimes on almost anybody they wish, as this article pointed out with import/export restrictions about flowers.
I'm currently reading a book titled "Three Felonies a Day" which details how the federal criminal system is broken. The book itself unfortunately is a series of anecdotes, rather than a deeper analysis of how we got to this situation. If you can find it at the library, I recommend skimming a few of the stories to get a feel for what's going on.
I'm obviously not a lawyer, but as far as I understand, federal law does not require a "guilty mind" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea), at least not to the same degree that traditional state law requires. In addition, many federal crimes are written very vaguely, sometimes to good effect (handling unforeseen criminal acts, obviously wrong, but not specifically banned by law), but more often to ill effect (yeah, that's fraud!).
Then, finally, there is the issue of the approach federal prosecutors take in pursuing cases, in which the push for convictions is more important than the push for justice. This results in approaches to cases such as "ladder climbing", where you indict the lower rungs of an organization (mayor's aids for example) with the threat of years of jail, and have them plea bargain out to almost nothing in exchange to testify against the person above them. Often, the choice for the person being accused is so obviously one sided that they'll creatively spin their testimony so that innocent behavior suddenly because "fraud" or "obstruction of justice" or similarly vague crimes.
One more sneaky thing that federal prosecutors do is that certain things are crimes, even where not obvious. For instance, lying under oath is obviously a crime (perjury). Lying to a federal officer while not under oath is also a crime (a felony no less).
So basically, federal prosecutors can pin very serious crimes on almost anybody they wish, as this article pointed out with import/export restrictions about flowers.