Slashdot Mirror
White House Decides P2P Isn't All Bad?
ethericalzen writes "An article this week at Cnet revealed that the White House doesn't necessarily hate everything about P2P. The Bush Administration apparently has called into question a law, known as the Federal Agency Data Protection Act, that would force all federal agencies to have plans guarding against the risks of P2P file sharing. In a Congressional hearing on IT security threats, the LimeWire founder was questioned about how his service warned users about the files and folders they are sharing. Karen Evans, the chief information officer for the federal government, stated that she was against singling out a particular technology when issuing computer security requirements. As it is the government already has a law which requires federal agencies to report on information security plans and risk assessments known as FISMA."
...filesharing is the number 1 threat of leaking sensitive information. Damn, and I wasted all that money on memory sticks, FTP servers, back doors, and searching busses, taxis and trains trying to get my hands on secret data.
This space is intentionally left blank
This was an off-the-cuff remark made by an individual who is loosely associated with the Bush administration. It is clearly not the stance of the administration, nor of the Republican Party as a whole.
One further wonders if this is an attempt to create FUD about P2P as a whole, and which organisations which are quite snug with the government might be interested in promoting this. But I'm probably just being too cynical now.
This space is intentionally left blank
Peer to peer... The single largest distribution network for files and other information.
This is why government isn't always a good thing.
Deleted
I wish everyone who believes in grand conspiracy theories could work in Washington DC for a couple of years. They would then realize that most conspiracies are a load of bull. The vast majority of the government is run by civil servants that are NOT political appointees. And having worked in Washington, if you get a stupid political appointee as a boss, the system has a lot of inertia, and tends to wait them out. Look at the track record for most appointees, based on my experience, most of them don't last four years. A couple of years is normal. Its easy for the bureaucracy to drag its feet for a couple of years. With a new appointee, you get new priorities. Problem solved. That and Washington leaks like a colander. Keeping a secret is impossible.
There is absolutely not a single good reason for anyone outside of a handful of employees at the Department of Justice who investigate copyright infringement and pornography to have Limewire installed on a government machine. That is precisely how the head of Limewire should have responded to Congress.
There are some limited applications for P2P in the government, but not an implementation like Limewire.
But then, why am I not surprised that Congress once again doesn't do the job we pay them to do? See, this is why I have come to the conclusion that maybe we need to call a new constitutional convention through state legislatures, and add in a constitutional amendment that contains an entire article of civil and criminal liability for each part of the body politic.
Personally, I think legislators ought to be held civilly and criminally liable where necessary for the negative outcomes of their laws. They don't hesitate to hold engineers, doctors, programmers, etc. accountable for their mistakes. Here's turnabout for them:
1) Establish two legal distinctions: misdemeanor and felony unconstitutionality. The distinction is that felony unconstitutionality is a blatant, obvious to anyone, violation of the constitution such as passing a gun ban in direct violation of the 2nd amendment or outlawing political speech. Everytime a law is declared unconstitutional, everyone who voted for it gets effectively put on trial. If it's at the Supreme Court, everyone gets sanctioned, without right to a trial, for supporting it. I mean, at that point, how could you argue that they should get their day in court when it is the SCOTUS ruling against their law?
2) Allow private citizens to sue members of Congress for loss of life, liberty, property and/or emotional distress caused by the enforcement of any unconstitutional law.
3) Declare that the only political activity that can be legally done while Congress is in session is government-related work. Make campaigning effectively timecard fraud that can cost the legislator their position. Allow the leadership of both parts of Congress to sanction members who go on a tangent like Arlen Spectre going after the NFL. Repeat offenders can be censored from entering Congress for up to one month. Imagine going back home to your district, and having to explain why you were so off topic from what is constitutional, that the Speaker of the House told you to shut up and go home. That's great for reelection.
Your obvious unconstitutional gun ban is my obvious constitutional neighborhood safety concern.
While I do agree with most of your points, and I have wished for a similar plan to be enacted, be careful of using the word obvious. What is obvious today as all people having life, liberty and pursuit of happiness only meant white, landowning males at the time of the founding fathers.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
The white house is against a law which restricts the white house.
They always have been, always will be, until Barack takes over, and probably still will be. This is not about P2P being good or evil, it is about limiting laws that limit the white house.
I would hope government agencies would be smarter enough than to, and have plans to prevent against, installing P2P applications on their computers. Seeing the reaction of the public to government agents losing laptops containing citizens' valuable personal data, how pleased do you think they would be seeing "Joe Smith's Tax Return.pdf" on Limewire? Most government documents aren't made to be shared amongst a large enough group of people to make P2P usefull in any way. The only acceptible use of P2P in this case would be to use bittorrent to distribute large documents that are intended to be viewed by the public.
My favorite part was this:
This is exactly the problem, not enough people understand technology... or really common sense. Limewire is not some default protocol available on any computer, it must be installed. It shouldn't be on any computer with sensitive information in the first place. Limewire didn't force it on those computers, so leave them alone, go after the idiots that installed it!! Of course, that would probably be themselves, and they're not going to put themselves in jail. And as far as deliberate misuse goes, I say we call in all baseball bat makers while we're at it; don't they realize how many felons they've aided by providing a product that can be used to assault people?
This reminds me of a classmate of mine that got a letter saying her information was possibly exposed to the internet through a website run by her high school. All I could think of was: "Why in the world was ANYONE's sensitive information anywhere near a computer with an apache server?".
If our dear leaders are realizing the importance of P2P, does this mean that in the (relatively) near future they may actually seek to end the BitTorrent throttling by broadband providers (specifically Comcast!)? Here's hoping so!
I'm looking at the comments on this page and I have to wonder if anyone remembers what file sharing is at its basic level.
Back in the late 80s, I was the editor of an entertainment supplement that ran in the newspaper in three mid-size towns. We had to use a modem to connect to each other and sometimes we could get a whole 1 kbps transfer rate to move text files. Within the office, file sharing was faster because we could swap floppy disks.
While I know you're all talking about swapping movies, music, games, etc., every corporate environment involves the sharing of information. A newspaper is a real good example of how you have to pull files in from your "peers" to collect and assemble them. Every day.
We spent so long looking for faster ways to move files around and now we've reached the point where this basic function is finally is working so well that we've gotta screw it up.
File sharing/information sharing is the purpose of the Internet. To even consider trying to stop it is ludicrous. You might as well just shut down the entire net because that's the only way file sharing stops. Then we'll just go back to faxes and snail mail.
Should it really be up to the guy that owns LimeWire to tell the government that maybe they shouldn't be using it at work? We have an Intelligence Department, but no one can figure out that, if they are going to use p2p, to do it from a machine with no sensitive information?
Probably not.
After all, most of the government still uses Windows, so security must not be that important to them.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..