Kurtz V. FBI, Round 487

Artist Steve Kurtz is still fighting off the FBI, which wanted to charge him with bioterrorism. “Kurtz used the analogy of a coffee grinder purchase to explain why the stakes in his case are so much weightier than artistic censorship. ‘Let’s say you go out and by a coffee grinder. And it says on it that you can’t grind spices in it, only coffee. And you say, to hell with that, I’m going to grind coffee and spices in it. If you do that and you send in your warranty — mail fraud. If they pull off that argument in court, it’ll make almost anyone vulnerable’.”