Why? Because one of the company’s employees answered a technical question unrelated to the company, while on his own time, about how a data transfer protocol worked, on a bulletin board forum unrelated to the company, that was also occasionally posted to by a suspected hacker.

This prompted the raid, during which the agents discovered copies of a book about hacking computers that didn’t exist in 1990 and don’t even exist now in 2012, using techniques that didn’t exist then and don’t exist now, set in the 2050s. The agents declared it a “handbook for computer crime” and made statements such as “this is real” to the press. The Secret Service walking out the door with all copies of the book the company had just finished writing almost put the publishing company out of business.

The book that describes the incredible series of blunders committed by the government in the course of the “investigation” that the SJ Games raid was part of is frequently misfiled by bookstores and public libraries in the fiction section because nobody is willing to believe it could happen in America. It happens anyway.