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Lawmakers Caught Again By File-Sharing Software
An anonymous reader writes "A document, apparently a 'confidential House ethics committee report,' was recently leaked through file-sharing software to the Washington Post. According to the article, 'The committee's review of investigations became available on file-sharing networks because of a junior staff member's use of the software while working from home.' Of course, P2P software is entirely at fault for this incident. If you begin seeing more interest in DRM from Congress, you now know why."
Reader GranTuring points out that the RIAA took the opportunity to make a ridiculous statement of their own. They said, "the disclosure was evidence of a need for controls on peer-to-peer software to block the improper or illegal exchange of music."
Don't blame the person who actually leaked it, blame the damned software!
Ahh...I love politics.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
So long as two computers can communicate with each other, so you will have P2P.
Luckily, we have politicians who's only education is in English, law, history, politics, art. So it's easy to push any techno-babble on them because they are dangerously uneducated fools.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
The government is starting to sound like Britney Spears.
Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.
Why should our government even have ethics documents that are confidential?
The amazing thing about these "Information Security Awareness Monthly" postings is that they blame P2P and then cite the example of a user using a P2P network to download an executable that contains a trojan. I guess that executables taken from regular webservers are fine, then.
...the need for more ethical members of Congress?
For months now, some RIAA-influenced Congressmen have been working on a crazily overbroad P2P regulation bill, H.R. 1319: The Informed P2P User Act. It just passed out of committee last month.
I would expect Congressmen to be falling all over each other to bring this to a vote now. After all, it's they're no longer just doing it for the RIAA/MPAA "campaign contributions." Now, it's personal.
There, fixed that for you.
If you seriously think that this was inadvertent, they you should probably read more Machiavelli
The RIAA would love for networks and the Internet to vanish. Sharing information electronically obviously upsets them.
Which cave did they crawl out of?
Many files have been copied and accessed due to Windows file sharing mistakenly enabled on a public LAN, should it be banned too?
I think "politician" is the most derogatory name you can call someone.
I always thought it was 'nigger'.
Any time you read "peer to peer software" in a RIAA statement or legal proposal, you should
substitute "open information networks", because there is no essential difference between those
concepts.
So what the RIAA is saying is:
"the disclosure was evidence of a need for controls on open information networks to block the improper or illegal exchange of music."
That allows us to frame the debate properly.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
This has NOTHING to do with P2P. They might not even be able to show P2P software had anything to do with it. The issue is that ANYONE who is stupid enough to hook a machine dealing with confidential information to the net is a bleeding fool and this includes all my lawyers' secretaries who had their word processing machines on the net - the lawyer who sent me his complete client list, a certain accountant who dropped off at a pawn shop (for $25 bux) all her clients income tax returns along with her DLT7000 (70 GB folks & the tape was in the $3500++ drive!). She used it to backup what ultimately would fit on a couple CD's! She _could_ have simply copied each years tax return to a floppy disk for the specific client! The list also includes a company that had their accounting staff re-input months of work because they picked up a virus in their key machines.
Computers are so cheap that it makes no sense what so ever to take chances like this.
That bill is there so that someone has to fry.
No longer can you say, "I didn't know it had installed itself and started downloading all the new movies in music, and then saved them to my 'Movies' folder." and have a reasonable doubt. Now you'll have to prove that the software in question didn't tell you that it was installing, and if it's true, the company will get nailed to the wall for it.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Don't confuse DRM with security. DRM exists for stuff that is supposed to be generally available for everyone, but has locks and restrictions on its use, even after the transaction or exchange of money. Security is for confidential stuff that is not designed to be accessed by everyone, even if they can pay. Those who use DRM may still want the public to use their stuff, but only on their terms. This is a case where those who wrote the document did not intend for it to become public at all.
This mistake kind of seems similar to accidentally clicking "Reply All" for an email message.
It figures the RIAA would use this to their advantage, even though illegal music downloads have nothing whatsoever to do with a house ethics committee report.
I agree with your clarification. This isn't intended to argue against what you said about that perception, but rather to highlight where that perception comes from.
The RIAA stated that "the disclosure was evidence of a need for controls on peer-to-peer software to block the improper or illegal exchange of music".
To answer your example, let's say that there is a wealthy, politically active group with a great deal of sympathy in Washington. This group is well-known for its hatred of briefcases because it finds them to be, shall we say, economically inconvenient. If the group said that such a smuggling is evidence that we need (i.e. government) control of briefcases, it might create that impression.
That's particularly true of the RIAA's statement since the document that was leaked has nothing to do with music. They are merely demonstrating that they're desperate for any excuse to demogogue anything related to P2P software, to the point that they will obviously clutch at straws like this. If they were really interested in security, they'd ask the same question another Slashdotter has already asked: why did they allow this person to work on secure documents with an unsecured computer? Only that wouldn't represent an opportunity to raise their pet issue, hence their problem with it.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
IANAL, but I'd never before heard of a law that explicitly required software to behave in a very specific way, and display very specific warnings. That alone tips this bill into the "big deal" category for me.
Add to this the tendency of prosecutors to misuse Federal statutes in ways that clearly exceed the legislative intent, and this law seems to open the door for prosecution of any government-targeted "bad guy" who also happens to have such 'illegal' network software.
And, of course, the original reason for this bill also stinks: it's almost certainly an RIAA-bought-and-paid-for law clearly designed to eliminate the "I didn't know" defense when suing file-sharers.
You must be american. Sharing is usually at least 2 way.
Which P2P sharing program are you referring to? The ones I've seen or tried have always made it fairly clear what they're sharing on your drive. LimeWire for example, displays a big list on your screen of the files it's marking for sharing if you click the "Share" button under "My Library" and try to share all your media. It has filters, as well, to make it easy to only share files with certain extensions (like MP3 or AVI).
I don't get how someone could overlook the fact it shares their material, even IF the default happens to be enabling the sharing functionality? If you're purposely ignoring a "What I'm sharing" link right at the top of the screen, and so forth - then I'd say it's the USER'S fault.
"meaning, I want these leaks to occur because that's the only way to get honest information about our Government."
There are plenty of leaks that appear accidental but are actually staged. No reason to believe this channel is any more honest or dishonest than their press releases.
Want to defeat the law? Easy! Just bring more cash to the table than the **AA.
Also: This law protects America against leaking National Security information. Why do you hate America?
But it doesn't share an "unspecified area" ... it shares a clearly defined area. Just because you don't see the stop sign doesn't mean it isn't there when you run it. We simply have a large percentage of monkeys pushing buttons on these things. Most of them failed to attend the monolith meetings...
Why the heck isn't someone reaming out the employee/staffer who used his government computer system for personal use? A screw-up like this in the private sector would get him/her fired from many companies for violating company policy regarding the allowed use of the computer system. If that member of congress's office didn't have an acceptable use policy, I'll bet they have one by Monday. It may not be popular to write this on Slashdot but if your employer provides you with a PC for use in your work, it's not really a "personal" computer and you really shouldn't be placing anything on it more personal than, say, a favorite wallpaper.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M