On September 3, 2025, federal authorities announced that they had dismantled the pirated sports‑streaming empire known as Streameast. According to media accounts, Egyptian police—assisted by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE)—arrested two men in the suburb of El‑Sheikh Zaid, seized computer equipment, and redirected more than eighty web domains to ACE’s “watch legally” landing page.
This police action came on the heels of the White House boasting of another victory: a US Navy destroyer had fired on a boat in the southern Caribbean, killing eleven people, the government claimed were Venezuelan drug traffickers and members of the Tren de Aragua gang. Later the same day, survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse stood on Capitol Hill pleading with Congress to release 33,000 documents related to the disgraced financier’s sex‑trafficking network. They condemned official secrecy while President Trump dismissed their cause as a “Democrat hoax” and administration officials warned that any legislator who signed a discharge petition to force disclosure would be committing a “very hostile act.”
This juxtaposition is telling. The federal government will deploy prosecutors, warships, and the full weight of international law to shut down an illicit streaming site and blow up a boat whose contraband is unproven, yet the same government has allowed Epstein’s clientele to remain anonymous. In a republic founded on suspicion of concentrated power, this selective enforcement invites skepticism: Are these actions about protecting people, or about protecting state interests and politically-favored actors?
The Streameast arrests were celebrated by sports leagues and anti‑piracy groups as a triumph of property rights. ACE trumpeted the site’s closure, noting that Streameast attracted 136 million visits per month and operated via a UAE shell company that had laundered more than $6 million since 2010. Ed McCarthy, an executive at DAZN—one of the leagues whose broadcasts were pirated—proclaimed that dismantling the platform was a “major victory for the entire sports ecosystem” and accused the operators of “siphoning [value] away from sports” and “putting fans and their data at risk.”
Libertarians should not cheer. The crime the defendants stand accused of is copying and transmitting streams of bits—an act that deprives no one of physical property and involves no violence. Unlike burglary or fraud, watching an unlicensed stream does not destroy or alter the original broadcast; it merely competes with the rights holder’s monopoly. Intellectual property laws, by contrast, grant the state a monopoly backed by violence: government agents can invade homes, seize computers, and imprison people for sharing information. In effect, the government purports to “own” patterns of information and criminalizes peaceful behavior. The Streameast arrests thus highlight the inversion of priorities: while the Department of Justice zealously enforces the entertainment industry’s monopoly, it continues to shield the names of powerful men who sexually exploited minors. A government that regards copying a football game as a greater threat than child rape cannot claim a moral high ground.
The destruction of the Venezuelan boat offers a second window into state power. Standing in the Oval Office, President Trump boasted that the Navy had “literally shot out a boat—a drug‑carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat,” and promised that “there’s more where that came from.” He later shared drone footage of the vessel exploding and insisted the strike killed members of a designated terrorist organization. Yet the Pentagon declined to specify what drugs were on board, their quantity, or even how the strike was carried out. Venezuelan officials, for their part, alleged that the video might have been generated with artificial intelligence. Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America stated the obvious: “Being suspected of carrying drugs doesn’t carry a death sentence.”
For more than fifty years, the United States has waged a war on drugs at home and abroad. Despite trillions spent and countless lives disrupted, drugs remain plentiful, and violence has escalated. One reason is that prohibition converts peaceful transactions into black‑market operations controlled by cartels. When governments destroy a vessel based on suspicion, they become judge, jury, and executioner. Due process evaporates; there are no trials, only explosions broadcast on social media. The strike on the Venezuelan boat should alarm anyone who believes in the rule of law. It also invites doubts about the target’s identity: the crew may have been fishermen, smugglers carrying contraband other than narcotics, or dissidents the Venezuelan government wished to see eliminated. “Trust us” is not an answer.
From a libertarian perspective, the proper response to drug use is neither interdiction nor execution but personal responsibility and voluntary treatment. Prohibition fuels corruption, militarizes police forces, and provides a pretext for interventions from the Caribbean to Afghanistan. If the state can incinerate a boat on the high seas in the name of keeping Americans safe, what can it not do? The boat’s destruction, like the Streameast arrests, illustrates the boundless elasticity of state power when the government decides that peaceful behavior must be crushed for the greater good.
At the Survivor’s press conference in Washington, women who had been lured and abused by Jeffrey Epstein described the horrors they endured. One survivor, Marina Lacerda, told reporters that she and other victims “are not going away” and implored Congress to release the files: “I would like for them to give all the victims transparency to what happened and release the files,” she said. “It’s not okay for us to be silenced.” Anouska De Georgiou warned that pardoning Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell would “undermine all the sacrifices I’ve made to testify.”
Massie’s discharge petition requires the signatures of 218 members to force a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act. So far, only four Republicans—Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Nancy Mace—have signed on. The imbalance reflects the political peril: siding with survivors means defying a White House that has labelled the petition a “very hostile act.” At the news conference, Trump waved away the issue as a “Democrat hoax that never ends,” while survivors insisted that transparency is essential to honoring their sacrifices and preventing future abuse.
One significant problem with government wielding such power is when it is inevitably exercised without uniformity, or worse yet, against the people themselves. As economist Robert Murphy observed, it is “amazing” that some Americans who distrust federal law enforcement agencies for alleged political conspiracies nonetheless cheer when the military blows up a boat simply because officials assure them “there were all drug traffickers on board,” and he cautioned that if this logic prevails, “law enforcement” will soon have drones patrolling US cities—raising the question of whether such extrajudicial violence is an appropriate response for people who care about evidence and trials.
The same pattern is evident in the Streameast arrests and in the government’s handling of Epstein: law enforcement acts decisively when the targets are powerless or foreign, but becomes lethargic when those implicated are wealthy or politically connected.
An honest legal system cannot prosecute streamers and suspected smugglers while shielding child rapists. A principled government cannot trumpet liberty while censoring dissent and burying evidence. The proper response is not to beg the state to be fairer but to question whether it should possess such powers in the first place. The victims standing with Thomas Massie, the millions who watch unsanctioned streams, and the unnamed men who financed Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes are—in different ways—bound together by a common truth: the greatest threat to liberty is not the pirate or the peddler but the state that claims the right to decide who gets punished and who walks free. The imagined victims of alleged crimes seem to have their justice. But the message to real victims is clear: the state will bury your case to protect the powerful.