A similar, and perhaps even more daring and damning, treatise by J.D. Tucille, from
http://civilliberty.about.com/ .
Declaration of Noncompliance
We have seen our nation turned from one based in liberty to one
based in expediency. We have seen Constitutional protections for
fundamental individual rights eroded by government that is actively
hostile to the legacy of individual sovereignty we inherited from the
American Revolution, and abandoned by countrymen who have
surrendered to fear, laziness, and complacency. We are entangled in
laws that portray natural rights as vices and attack them in the name of
false security, and by government that grows like a cancer until it
occupies every area of human life. We find our speech threatened, our
communications spied upon, our privacy violated, our finances probed,
our bedrooms monitored, our bodies controlled, our businesses
regulated, our property stolen, our income taxed into nonexistence, and
ourselves disarmed by officials who find comfort in the thought of
prostrate subjects. We have seen people fined, imprisoned, and even
murdered by officials for doing no more than acting on their liberty in
ways that draw the displeasure of those who treat independence as a
threat and the coercive power of the state as a plaything.
To our neighbors who have lost their faith in freedom, we quote
Benjamin Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." The trade of
liberty for promises of security is always a bad one, for it exchanges a
priceless necessity for a hollow comfort that can not be guaranteed.
To the politicians and officials who treat our rights as if they were
privileges that they might limit or remove at will, we say that we have
had enough. You have overstepped your bounds and cut away at that
which no government, no legislature, no agency, no referendum, no
quorum, no majority, and no power of any sort may trespass against
except at its own peril. By your actions, you have deprived the
institutions in which you do your worst of their legitimacy.
From this day forward, we vow that we will no longer be bound by
statutes, edicts, judicial decisions, or administrative regulations that
violate our inalienable rights. We pledge to practice principled
noncompliance with such impermissible restrictions on our liberty, and
to encourage others to do the same.
We pledge to monitor the activities of politicians and government
bureaucrats who threaten liberty, and to share such information as we
gather with others who also value freedom so that those who engage in
abuses can not hide behind official anonymity.
We pledge to treat our presence in the jury room as an opportunity to
engage in the ancient right of jury nullification, by avowing the
innocence of those who have run afoul of one of the multitude of
statutes and regulations that infringe liberty, for such people are truly
innocent of any real crime.
We pledge to otherwise assist those who have incurred official wrath for
doing no more than exercising their rights in ways that are forbidden by
the whim of the state.
We further pledge, to the best of our abilities, to obstruct continued
intrusions by the state upon our liberty, and to impede the enforcement
of such violations of our rights as are already in place.
We make this declaration only after due consideration, and after
long and continued provocation. We do this not to turn our backs on
our friends, relatives, and neighbors who have been duped into
abandoning liberty, but to defend the rights whose value they have
forgotten for them as well as ourselves. We hope that our example will
serve as an inspiration.