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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.
Who else here read the title at first and thought that?
:)
Perhaps it's Mr. Gates at it again
University - a box of academia nuts.
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?
And I agree, this is corperatism and it's absolute bullshit. I'm getting sick and tired of hearing about how goverment agency X attempts to enfoce the unenforcable with new and buggier technology, then proceeds to hange some poor guy or gal on the highest pole they can fine. Pretty soon time will be copyrighted and so will words.
This is a complete waste of our goverment which can be doing useful things such as tracking down pedophiles or hanging rapists assholes. Hell, if corperates had their way police would be giving out nothing but tickets, letting the real criminals go (becuase it costs money to put em' in jail)...I don't think most polcemen signed onto the force to go after the average joe who's sick of a media monopoly, I think they'd rather be cracking the skull a real criminal.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
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 dont have the energy to read the article but how would FBI, The US Goverment and the US public feel about non-us goverments policing p2p-nets? Would they be outraged or welcome the "help"? The Internet is public domain, not US property.
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.
Context:
Now that anyone I know can afford a book how will the church control information? Now that anyone I know can afford to copy a page from a book, how will publishers and printers stay in business?
Shit happens. It's not our government's job to protect us from knowledge and information... unlike in those "free" countries you mentioned.
I guess they won't touch average Joe Geek for file sharing, but if they see you are suspect, they may arrest you, just for this bogus reason that you shared your files and start some more serious investigation with you legally in jail.
In darkest times of communist terror in Poland, there was a common saying "Don't worry, they can find a paragraph for everyone". Seems this law is just one more of such paragraphs to "match everyone".
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
This seems like it's already in their domain. Don't they already have the authority to intercept and monitor electronic communications? Have jurisdiction over interstate transfers/transactions/deliveries? Can prosecute cases with more than $5,000 damage (which, thanks to inflated estimates, copyright infringement cases are)? And hey, it's a feature of most p2p apps that they essentially open up your computer for inspection for the potentially offending material, so it's not like they need to legislate around unreasonable search/seizure laws.
I really don't see what extra powers the FBI needs here.
Tweet, tweet.
right? Whatever happened to the millions of cases the FBI solved, or prevented crimes, or caught murderers? You never hear about them, so you only get this picture of a bumbling group of people wearing FBI coats.
Wholesale copying of the entirety of hundred or thousands of titles and making those copies available to an audience of strangers across the entire globe is not, and never has been, considered fair use.
If you copy your entire CD collection and serve it up to the world, that's infringement, not fair use.
The only thing that the great crowd of filesharing whiners is going to get for the rest of us is a bunch of costly and annoying technical copy prohibition schemes.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Al Quaida have carried another attack. 3000 dead. FBI agents plan to carry out a full investigation shortly after they jail 14 year old Tommy who is suspected of piracy and crimes against public decency. "Sicko baby" said Officer Pat "He was redistibuting filth, including a full Madonna CD. Makes me want to vomit." Asked to comment on the new Al Quaida atrocity, Pat said "Its just another couple of planes. Been there and seen that before. First, we gotta take down Suzy in Queens first - word on the street is that she's sharing hard-core Justin Timberlake! We gotta protect the kids from that threat."
Welome to the land of the free and home of the brave.
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
Its telling that the most auspicious factoid regarding the FBI is that their former leader used to wear dresses.
I don't want to see any replies to this post. Get away from Slashdot and do something other than whine, or you'll have no one to blame but yourself.
Are you still here? Stop reading and start acting!
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
No i think they should start at the home - FBI stakeouts should raid teens who lend cd's to their friends. These crack-houses of teen music sharing need to be shut down. This sort of crime has been going on way longer than modern internet file sharing. Infact ever since consumer availiable music and video recordings were availiable people have been illigally "lending" eachother copies. This sort of crime has got to stop. Theres no easy way to police file trading without getting caught up in all sorts of messy 1st amendment, freedom of this and that laws so i think the FBI should concentraite on the more tangable, phyisical and "real" cd swapping going on. Thats just my opinion
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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.
This strikes me as a continuation of the cost-shifting that began when sufficient levels of copyright violation were made 'criminal'. The cost of prosecuting a civil case is borne by the plaintiff (i.e. the RIAA). The cost of prosecuting a criminal case is borne by the taxpayer. Hence the criminalisation of copyright violation caused the costs of prosecuting those violations to be shifted from the RIAA et al to the taxpayer.
This is the same type of thing. The RIAA et al faces fairly high costs in trying to deal with P2P networks. Putting the FBI in charge of policing P2P networks means the taxpayer will be funding those investigations instead of the RIAA.
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.
Is this where our Tax Paying money is going? Is this why we have the FBI? Funny, I thought it was to keep murderers and rapists off the street, you know...DANGEROUS CRIMINALS. I didn't know that they were going to go after the millions of TEENAGERS who are downloading the latest song off the net.
I must give the RIAA credit though, they finally realized that they could not afford the bill to keep suing people with no money so they bri...er gave campaign contributions to some congressman to make the tax payers pay the bill. Something about the sleaziness of all this that you have to admire.
What will the FBI do though? The FBI likes to go after people with MONEY or is a high profile person. The majority of users donâ(TM)t fit either of those categories. The FBI will make a big show of going after people at first but one they find out the joys of WHACK-A-MOLE P2P they will only go after the big fish like the riaa is doing anyway.
I hope this bill donâ(TM)t pass but I am too pessimistic to believe otherwise
Hear hear!
I download plenty of things that I did not pay for, but I don't try to rationalize my actions with bullshit arguments about 'rights'. What I'm doing is illegal, and possibly immoral. When I speed, I don't get angry at the cop for pulling me over, I knew I was doing something illegal, did it anyway, and got caught.
I may feel that some of the specifics of the speeding laws are off-base, I may feel that some streets have the wrong minimum speeds, but that doesn't mean that I feel that we should tear the whole concept of speeding violations down. Just as I feel that lengths of copyrights, and who can own them and what can be done with them might be wrong, but I still see the good in them (protecting people who make their living by their ideas).
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
I went and saw Sade in concert only after hearing an mp3 of hers. My wife and I would NEVER have done that without first hearing her latest music. She's come very far since the eighties.
The corporate machine is not fascist, or totalitarian. It's greedy, is all. The dummies who want to kill p2p are just shooting themselves in the foot because they aren't smart enought to realize that it BOOSTS the ecconomy. Come on Harvard, where are the papers to back this up!?!
Despite the obvious flaws of the FBI, including the Hooverite legacy, let's keep in mind why the police (including the FBI) exist -- to enforce laws, instead of having a bunch of vigilantes enforce the laws in the particular manner they want. Quite frankly the FBI is much more appropriate in this way than all the various "let's deputize copyright holders and let them go out and enforce", including stuff like Palladium and the recent Hollings proposal. Far too many proposals lately have been effectively about creating a corporate police force.
There is no guarantee this law will stop criminal activity. However, "copyright holders" have a track record of using these types of laws to silence detractors and competitors. Just think of all the abuses of the DMCA. A guy was going to give a speech about how crappy ebook encription was, so the company had him arrested under the DMCA. Printer manufacturers use it to shut down competing ink cartridge manufacturers. Various cults and companies routinely use it to shut down naysayer websites. The list goes on and on.
In these cases, States + Corporations do equal fascism! More and more these days, the US Government together with large Corporations (not nessesarily US based) are acting like the old Soviet Union. Censorship (DMCA). Banning of devices which may override censorship (mandated DRM). Taking away individual's property rights (Selling something to a customer, then, after they pay, saying it's really leased, and you have to follow a very absurd and restrictive license agreement). In Soviet Russia, the government owns you. In Soviet US, the corporations own you.
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
I'm not delusional about the fact that I'm stealing.
Jesus Christ! It is NOT theft! It is copyright infringement! They are two very different things!
1. If the FBI started pulling over speeders and making them serve 5 year jail terms, you would presumably have to protest.
2. Speeding is a criminal act. File sharing is not. Copyright violation is a CIVIL matter.
-Graham
Try this question: Is it possible to win a presidential election without corporate sponsorship? I think Bill Hicks said it best when he compared the Democrats and Republicans to a pair of puppets, sharing a puppeteer.
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.
This post from DesScorp has a few serious inaccuracies.
It was not the case that "apparently Chinese intelligence had penetrated the Los Alamos lab". On the contrary, it was apparently the case that Chinese intelligence had obtained secrets about nuclear warheads that could only have come from a contractor OUTSIDE of the lab, someone further downstream in the weapons production process. Although the discovery of this leak led investigators to look initially at Los Alamos, Los Alamos was eventually ruled out as the source of the information.
Interest in Wen Ho Lee continued, for a variety of reasons, but mostly, in my opinion, because he was a convenient scapegoat for perceived problems at the time.
Later, after an inspection of his lab computer, he was discovered to have backed up some of his data on to magnetic tapes. This led to an entirely separate and different legal case, the case that ended up being brought against him.
But that case was a crock. The data he backed up, or "downloaded" as the prosecutors liked to say, was the code he was working with along with supporting libraries and other parts of the build environment. He had had experience with computers at the Lab crashing and losing data. Also he knew there was a RIF (Reduction In Force) coming up, and the way those work at the Lab is sometimes someone is RIF'ed and then almost immediately re-hired, only to have to rebuild their work environment (computing environment) from scratch. Defenders of Lee have pointed out that wanting to avoid having to rebuild his work environment from scratch was a perfectly innocent motivation for having made tapes.
I own a security brochure from Los Alamos Lab which urges workers to "_Always_ Back Up Your Data On Cartridges or Tapes." It does not say "tell the backup department to back up your data." It basically says do it yourself. The brochure is not classified, but refers to both classified and unclassified data.
Back to DesCorp's post. "The investigation focused on Lee..." again, there were two investigations, two different cases, the first was found to be ridiculous (the data couldn't have come from Los Alamos); the second was ginned up to help the prosecuting entities avoid embarassment.
By the way, contrary to what is often implied in the media, Lee did not take the tapes home. They remained in the secure area of the lab, behind a tall fence with gates that have iris scanners, palm print scanners, metal man cages, 24 hour armed guards, etc. etc.
At the end of Lee's final hearing, at which he was released, the judge in the case apologized to Lee and pointed out that Lee was also owed an apology from the other branches of government.
Which leads to the final and most serious inaccuracy in DesCorp's post, about the historical view of the case now, after the fact. Washington insiders (other than a few paranoid diehards) do not think the botching of the case involved letting a spy get away. Rather, they think the botching of the case was in fingering the wrong man. Vernon Loeb, the intelligence reporter for the Washington Post, has affirmed in writing that this is his understanding of what people in Washington think. It's probably not neccessary to point out that he is someone who has his finger pretty well on the pulse of the Washington intelligence community.
Whatever happened to the millions of cases the FBI solved, or prevented crimes, or caught murderers?
I deal with them all the time as a newsman. That is their friggin' job. They are the federal police and they catch criminals. They work on high profile cases. That is what they do. Slapping them on the back for a job well done? Then you really are going to wear your arm out slapping everyone else in America on the back as well for doing their job right, and keeping society running. I love those guys, but sucking up to their good points just slows down the process... besides it is a special person that can be in the FBI, they choose them for loyalty and determination.
If you want to thank anyone in law enforcement, thank the beat cops in major cities, they are the ones that have to shake the tree daily and find the street punks that are the most dangerous to the public at large. FBI can be patient and call in all the people they want, due to the nature of the criminals they are pursuing. Beat cops are the ones that most likely get shot. Some FBI agents I know have their gun in their desk. That is a big difference in law enforcement style.
Look, the FBI are good guys. But allowing them jurisdiction on a corporate and civil matter is preposterous. It is corporatism. It is where this country is going. Copyright infringement is not outright theft, but it is not allowable either. It is prosecutable, but the FBI sure as hell does not need to be involved in it. They have much bigger fish to fry these days than worrying about file sharing on the internet.