Authoritarians in Your Back Yard

We used to call them little Napoleans, the jerks who just have to push other people around. Twenty years ago they were laughable. But today, the Homeland Security militarization of American society has turned them into motherfuckers with the power to destroy people's lives for no reason other than self-gratification.

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Charles puts the NCAA’s famously due process-free investigations in useful context:

Unfortunately, too many institutions unleash the Inner Authoritarian in too many people these days. There are companies that test for drugs without cause. There are human resources goons who pry into personal lives. There are sniveling little bureaucrats crawling through cyberspace, making sure that nobody’s honest opinion can damage The Brand. There are TSA agents having a giggle at the nekkid pictures of the travelers who have to walk through their scanners. These are people who confuse The Rules with the law. They cannot distinguish between the company policy and the penal code. They seek de facto legal authority without the vital counterweight of the guarantees of personal liberty embedded (more or less) in our system of justice. And, too often, they get it. Think about all the people in your life who could screw it up for some offense, real or imagined. Very often, the cops come in quite far down the list.
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This is what happens when you give people license to unleash their Inner Authoritarian, when you encourage them in thinking that the arbitrary enforcement of irrational codes of behavior designed to keep a labor force unpaid that is making you billions of dollars are somehow on an equal footing with actual criminal and civil law. This is what happens when you encourage bureaucrats to act like cops. This is what happens when you tell your people that a clipboard and a briefcase are the same as a badge and a gun. You get low comedy with human consequences.