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Bill Would Let FBI Police File-Sharing
vnguyen6 writes "According to an article on MSNBC, a bill introduced in the Senate gives the FBI power to police file sharing. As if the FBI didn't have their own messes to clean up such as the handling of pre-911 intelligence, FBI agents turned spy (Robert Hanssen), the Los Alamos lab debacle, double agent Mrs. Katrina Leung, need I say more?"
It's called corporatism and was very aptly described and put into context by Mussolini. No troll, no joke.
Yeah, if this passes, the era of Kazaa et al. will end perminantly, as everyone will be too scared to get caught to share or download as the FBI WILL catch people for copyright violations. Fair use? Hah.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
.. And I wonder what sophisticated monitoring techniques the FBI would use to filter out those individuals who grossly leech tons of files, and those who just happen to be sharing within their fair use rights among friends, and those who just happen to have a library of legally-obtained copyrighted files.
Oh wait, that's not on their checklist now is it?
As the article pointed out, this isn't the FBI's job, and âoe[i]t gives them a chance to scare a lot of users into thinking the government is after them.â This should be handled through the courts, not the RIAABI--err--FBI... I can just imagine 100 million people being arrested by the FBI due to copyright infringements...
-William Brendel
I've bought maybe 3 CDs in the past few years and only directly from the artists (usually independantly made) here in Austin. I download music I'm interested in off of Kazaa/eMule and refuse to ever buy the CD if it's an RIAA company.
That said, we _are_ guilty of copyright infringement, and the sharing networks could pretty easily lock out that material. As a software engineer I very much dislike seeing software pirated online and it'd be pretty hypocritical of me to support downloading music but wanting to punish/prevent software piracy.
The point is, we're commiting a federal crime, which falls under FBI jurasdiction, it's pretty hard to contest this. Contest the laws, fine, but give me a good reason this doesn't fall under the FBI's umbrella.
Coming soon: Off shore shell accounts with pre-installed CLI p2p clients.
"As if the FBI didn't have their own messes to clean up such as the handling of pre-911 intelligence, FBI agents turned spy (Robert Hanssen), the Los Alamos lab debacle, double agent Mrs. Katrina Leung, need I say more?"
If McDonald's announced it were going to start selling BBQ pork chops, would you say "as if they didn't have their own messes...one time an employee spit in a burger...need I say more?"
Or, maybe you saw a small bug in notepad.exe...quick! Condem all of Microsoft! (ok, maybe)
But, aside from this file-sharing issue, it seems you have an FBI axe you'd like ground to the hilt. I'm sure the FBI is far from perfect. How do you propose it be fixed?
Service Announcement: The text of this post that you've just read is copyright, me, and I have not given you permission to read it. You are in violation of my copyright and the FBI will be raiding you soon. Thank you.
What the next generation of P2P needs is the ability for it's users to be anonymous. This could be acomplished by routing all P2P packets through at least one third party node. The third party node is the only node that knows the IP addresses of the two sides and it does not keep any logs. In addition, why not encrypt all network traffic as well.
Of course as soon as a viable solution exists that makes people anonymous on the internet, no doubt the congress-critters will pass legislation to make it illegal.
Shh.
To be honest, I don't think technology is on their side. Other than the occasional string up someone and make an example out of them, or the occasional beat someone down who admits it publicly, I think that 99.99% of the population could share information freely and never be touched.
In a way that is the point. The purpose of politics (and less directly government) is that it's better to fight wars with words rather than with blood. But to copy things does not require coercion at all, the rules are not the same, we are not dealing with limited resources where when one person gains another looses. They will not get disenfranchised help, they will not get public support, and they will not get personal fufillment helping a bunch of hollywood brats act like the gestapo.
Shame that other countries are starting to crack down on copyright infringements as hard if not harder than the US. Pretty soon it won't matter where you live.
And I'll only give you one guess who's driving that train.
Slashdot'ers whine as police officers enforce traffic laws.
And this is a problem why?
Anybody with a lick of common sense realizes that most traffic laws exist to generate a revenue stream for the government and have almost nothing to do with public safety.
Did you realize that posted speed limits aren't needed, because traffic is pretty much self-regulating? Do you HOW the determine what the speed limit for a given stretch of road is? They monitor speeds over that stretch, and set the actual speed limit to the 85th percentile speed.
Now, you've got the cops aiming cameras at red lights, to catch people who run the red light. Talk about a blatant violation of civil liberties. The government doesn't have any right to watch me at every intersection I travel though, just because I happen to be driving a car. "driving a car" is hardly "probably cause" for anything. Likewise, those "Operation Eagle" checkpoints they do in NC to catch drunk drivers, are so fucking unconstitutional it makes me want to vomit.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Hey, I'm just saying there is no room for any kind of sustainable commercial software industry in those countries because piracy goes unchecked. I'm not advocating the FBI stepping in and changing any rules about what you can or can't say or read.
Sending the 0101010's of Microsoft Windows XP + serial to your buddy for him to use without paying is not covered by the first ammendment or any other law.
Sure industries need to adapt, and the ones most under fire from piracy have shown a strong will against adapting to give consumers what they want. But a strong attempt at a boycott should have been tried before we turned to looting.
While not an "offical" rule, it is generally regarded that the FBI will not pursue a case unless at _LEAST_ $10k in damages was done. For you normal people and small businesses, this means $10k in _actual_ damages. For example, I believe credit card numbers are given a weight and it takes so many of them to get the FBI to investigate a case of a cracker stealing them. For you little people this does not include the time you wasted dealing with this. However, if you were a big business then it of course does.
As for this case, the $10k rule doesn't apply since this insane value (up to $250,000? iirc) has been placed on copyright violations. Perhaps if the FBI valued a "stolen" song on what it is actually worth we wouldn't have this problem.
On top of the insane overvaluing of copyright violations there is the fact that the law doesn't state copyright violation as theft, they didn't actually lose anything. So lets assume that a 15 song CD costs $15 (not that this is accurate). Then a stolen song from the CD should be worth $1, oh for fun we'll say it was the one good song on the album and give it a $2 value. So it would take 5000 of the best songs on 5000 cds to make the FBI even look at the case under normal circumstances.
Then one would think, wait, $10k worth of damages wasn't actually done. No one was actually deprived of anything besides what they thought they were due. So then we end up with another problem, how much are they actually worth? It gets very complicated and basiclly comes down to what we all knew all along, some is getting bought off.
Because the FBI hasn't solved millions of cases, hasn't prevented much crime, hasn't caught many murderers.
We have more unsolved crimes than ever before, more drugs, more crime, more people in prison, more criminals on the street, etc., than ever before.
When it comes to the war on terror, the FBI bungled all the warnings they were supposed to deliver to Bush and have imprisoned over a hundred times as many innocent people as they have caught 'terrorists'. The FBI has pushed for the dissolution of more and more civil liberties for no reason other than to increase their own power.
The FBI has on its list of achievements:
- put kids in federal prison for copying programs
- put kids in federal prison for sharing music
- used your tax dollars to help Microsoft
- installed their 'Magic Lantern' spyware on every Windows XP box now sold
- gotten all major virus scanners to turn a blind eye when it comes to detecting FBI spyware
All in all, the FBI is not a government agency that serves the people. Rather, the FBI is the police force that corporations and the government use to crack down on the populace. Funded by your tax dollars, of course.
This paves the way for some serious contemplation.
Consider an earlier article published last week, where Sweden was about to enforce draconian IP laws and rights to enforce them. Those laws would lead to their police (and probably other obscure agencies) starting to patrol(1) a lot of Internet services such as p2p networks for example. How would this be received by other nations as there is not simple way of distinguishing a user's nationality from some IP address?
Let's face it, going down the current path, the US isn't going to be the only country doing massive interception and analysis of communication on the Internet and when the politicians wake up and smell the coffee, this kind of mess will have spiraled far out of their control.
Ponder this. Does anyone imagine a government capable of intercepting and filtering most communication to be standing on some kind of high moral and ethical ground where a reasoning like "The correct thing for us to do is to only police our own waters for domestic criminal activity" is going be the current agenda?
No friggin way is my assessment.
This is paving the way for a situation where espionage(2) is the trade of the day. In a few years when most states have caught up with any current technological forerunners there are, in my view, going to be only two choices. Either you encrypt all traffic(3), allowing you some kind of domestic protection, or you will have no protection at all.
The future in my view looks rather bleak if certain politicians and their fellow lobbyists are going to have their way. As I see it, the first ones to realize this problem has been the same type of people making the technological measures allowing such potential abuse, tech-savy folks such as some members of this blog. Mr. and Mrs. Clueless will be the first ones lined up against the wall as they will be caught off guard, unaware of how technology works and how it can be abused and thus unable to protect themselves from the private agendas of those with monetary and political power.
As a final Note. Most know that the last 9 in 99.999% availability figure is extremely expensive to obtain. Likewise, getting the last 9 when it comes to making people law-abiding(4) is going to be infinitely more expensive both from a monetary cost and most importantly, the cost of lost freedom...
As many of us know, the only information system totally secure is a system without external interfaces. The only secure(5) or safe society is a society without a mind of it's own, without free thought.
Which society do you wish the future to hold?
1. Meaning intercepting and scanning.
2. Of foreign power, corporate and any entity which the people with the means might be interested in for one reason or another.
3. Since modules in a computer system co-exist and make use of each other more and more for various tasks, it's getting harder and harder to know what component is transmitting what information and thus the only way to feel some kind of security is to only allow encrypted traffic.
4. Be it a valid law supported by the majority of the citizen or not.
5. Also known as "safe" or "convenient" in some corporate lingo.
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
Will not paying parking tickets also become a Federal crime next?
Do politicians have a clue as to why they don't have the public's respect anymore?
Perhaps they've proven they don't deserve it.
Just think. If anyone had come forward last year to put up the startup money for a professionally run high-tech PAC to represent us to Congress, we'd be talking this year about getting the votes together to get rid of the DMCA and any politician stupid enough to refuse to cooperate with us.
"People always get the local government they deserve."
E.E. "Doc" Smith
This is as a grim a comment about US geeks (and the ones who aren't doing anything about anti-tech political action in the EU) as can be made.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Sorry, your claim doesn't make sense. Capitalism is an economic system. Facism/Corporatism is a political system. They are different. You can have a capitalist economic system and a Fascist political system. Indeed, you could have a capitalist economic system with a socialist political system. Let me guess-- you're an engineer or scientist who never took a single course outside of your discipline above the 200 level in college, right? Don't go making claims and criticising people on subjects about which you know little. This is not a discussion about computer architecture.
Moreover, one can easily criticise the system under one which lives. I can very easily claim that I enjoy living somewhere even if I disagree with the changes in the political system under which I live. There is no conflict, and in order for my criticism to be insightful and important I need not leave the country.
The current legislation proposes something very old-fashioned: the privatization, in a sense, of our law enforcement. Oh, the FBI would still be publicly funded, but essentially their mission would be reconstituted to make them the private police force of immensely wealthy copyright holders. We'd have a situation analogous in substance to 19th century America, with its strike-breaking private cops doing the bidding of their factory masters. Not only would the FBI be the servant of the music, movie and software companies, flattening any and all freedoms that thwart the perfect and unfettered progress of business (while also forging the kinds of interconnectedness that would make it politically and legally hard ever to police those industries).
But more drastically, the FBI would become a tool used to correct a failure of the marketplace: it would become the bludgeon that stops the consumer revolt that is embodied in online file trading - expunging, through intrusion and harassment, any impulse but that of proper obedience. Is a generation of future American debtors missing the lesson of arbeit macht frei? Then the FBI will be called in to teach them the fundamentals!
Mind, this is of a piece with Hatch's outburst last week about destroying downloaders' computers. Such is Washington's obsequiousness before the power it serves, and so deep runs its contempt for the freedoms of average citizens. (It's all fine and good to trot out your defense secretary to call freedom "messy" when it's overseas; but here, of course, here we send in the G-Men.) The Net has allowed the little person a measure of freedom not dreamt of in the corridors of our oligarchy. I don't expect our rulers to rest until they've brought this democratic, not to say anarchical, spirit to heel.
Determining what is and is not âbusiness-as-usualâ(TM) is difficult with nothing more than a blurb-length report to go on.
There have been a lot of threads here, some philosophically/politically loaded with arguments of varying quality: the first thread talked about control of the economy under Mussoliniâ(TM)s Fascism. Another attacked that one, praising raw capitalism while yet another early note gave what might or might not be an informed view of how the Naziâ(TM)s handled capitalism under the third Reich. Somehow, the subject became very dramatic and youâ(TM)ve got to ask if high drama is justifiable when you look at the core of the thing.
Without drama, there are good reasons to say that there is nothing new in the FBI being made to favor the interests of American businessâ"even businesses whose actions are as loathsome as the music industryâ(TM)s with regard to file-sharing. The proposition of the bill can be looked at as a (sad) comment on the nature of our government: people and organizations with vast sums have influence which often overrides the interests of the massesâ"thatâ(TM)s, âyou and me,â(TM) bud.
We live in a representative democracy and the systemâ(TM)s oddest and ugliest flaw is that wealthy people and organizations direct the actions of government more directly, and more immediately than the slower processes of ordinary governance: this is the âno surpriseâ(TM) factor. The FBI is directed by the federal government, the federal government is run by societyâ(TM)s loudest voices and money is an amplifier that drowns out other voices (If you think this is untrue, you probably like the âBig-Mac-for-you/your salary-x-ten for them,â(TM) tax-cuts).
In the final analysis, it really is a matter of voices. Many of us want to say, âthe music industry has been at the trough for too long and the net has changed everything.â(TM) For their part, maybe a dozen multibillion-dollar corporations with the money to make a politicianâ(TM)s re-election campaigns with their contributions alone want the government to wage a campaign to frighten nameless, faceless people who are costing them money.
This raises two key questions: âWhy is this surprising news?â(TM) and âWhom do you expect to win?â(TM)
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"Yeah. It smells, too..."