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."

Comments

So...

[XPeter]

Don't blame the person who actually leaked it, blame the damned software!

Ahh...I love politics.

Re:So...

[causality]

To their defense, we do have safety bottles today because at some point a baby died eating pills thinking they were candies. It's all about protecting the incompetent from themselves.

I wouldn't blame the pill bottle for that. Instead, I'd ask "where were the parents when this happened?"

Re:So...

[TheRealMike]

I wouldn't blame the pill bottle for that. Instead, I'd ask "where were the parents when this happened?"

The question is: Why/How could the kid get access to the pill bottle? Substitute pill bottle with knife/weapon/dangerous stuff/ and use the result when needed. Is the safety bottle unbreakable? If not i don't care how hard it is to open it. If the kid get's it hands on it bad things can happen. Mike

Connections

[Wowsers]

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.

Re:Connections

[rxmd]

Luckily, we have politicians who's only education is in English...

By corollary, given that they do seem to have an advantage in that area, a solid grasp of English seems like a good idea if you want to convince them of anything.

Re:Connections

[causality]

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.

They're dangerous because they are unaware of what they don't know, so they feel qualified (authorized) to make decisions about what they do not really understand.

When the Oracle at Delphi pronounced Socrates the wisest man in all of Greece, Socrates gave a response beyond reproach. He said, "If I am the wisest man, it is because I alone know that I know nothing."

Re:Connections

[TheRaven64]

The problem is more subtle than that. They will talk to someone that they perceive as being an expert. Lobbyists working for the relevant industries are probably the only people who they know who are close to being experts (or able to put them in touch with experts). Political think tanks are another source of expert opinions. The end result is that the politicians get a very skewed view of what experts actually believe. There is no good mechanism in place for politicians to get impartial expert opinions. This ought to be the job of the civil service, but they haven't done it well for a good few decades.

Re:Connections

[causality]

That's all too true.

and that's why journalists backed by newspapers gets freedom of the press, while individual bloggers gets court orders and/or sentences...

... by people who have no idea what "the press" was when the 1st Amendment was written. Much of it was not large and institutional. It was often as simple as a concerned citizen distributing pamphlets or starting his own local editorial. The individual bloggers are true to this spirit in a way that the media conglomerates could never hope to be.

More importantly, it was better understood that when you read such materials, you were reading the perspective of the author. It was not taken as the "final word" the way professional news is too-often regarded.

Re:Connections

[commodore64_love]

Earlier this week, he professor used a lecture at King's College, London, to say that smoking cannabis created only a "relatively small risk" of psychotic illness and it was actually less harmful than nicotine or alcohol. But on Friday he was forced to quit after receiving a letter from Home Secretary Alan Johnson who said his comments had undermined the scientific independence of the council.

The professor told the BBC..... "Gordon Brown comes into office and soon after that he starts saying absurd things like cannabis is lethal... it has to be a Class B drug. He has made his mind up. We went back, we looked at the evidence, we said, 'No, no, there is no extra evidence of harm, it's still a Class C drug.' He said, 'Tough, it's going to be Class B.'" Prof Nutt said drug laws should not be influenced "petty party politics" and compared them to interest rates, which are set by the Bank of England not the government.

Sounds like a perfectly good example to me. It's not about science and what the evidence shows (marijuana is not particularly dangerous), but about what one man named the prime minister BELIEVES and his power to force his belief on others (make marijuana a class B restricted substance). It's not different than a monarchy in that respect.

Personally this is why I don't think a central government should be making decisions about what citizens can or can not ingest. If I want to smoke marijuana or drink alcohol until I kill myself, and someone finds my rotting body in my home, so be it. That's freedom. It includes not just the right to life, but also the right to end your life, if that's what you choose to do.

Without that right, you're not liberated. You're a serf..... under somebody else's control.

Re:Connections

[smoker2]

The technical error is that they forgot the words "incorrectly configured" before P2P software. If you omit those 2 words, it tars any P2P software ever, with the brush of dangerous. Not to mention that the documents shouldn't have been on a private computer. Would they be concerned that the documents had been contaminated by filth if there had been donkey porn on there too ? Should the main target in a libel case be MS Word 2003 ?

The sadest part of this is..

[rjgill]

Why should our government even have ethics documents that are confidential?

Re:The sadest part of this is..

[nomadic]

Why should our government even have ethics documents that are confidential?

Guess they figure it's unfair to publicly announce someone's being investigated if there are no merits to the claim. Want to run for congress? Get someone to accuse your opponent of something bad, then publicize the resulting investigation.

Re:The sadest part of this is..

[Compholio]

Why should our government even have ethics documents that are confidential?

Guess they figure it's unfair to publicly announce someone's being investigated if there are no merits to the claim. ...

Then why does congress get this kind of protection when private citizens suspected of a crime do not?

Re:The sadest part of this is..

[dragonsomnolent]

I concur, if you've ever been accused, or know someone who is accused of a crime, should it be serious enough to report, the media will say allegedly or accused once (so that they can say they said accused and didn't taint a potential jury pool), and then go about reporting the accusations by the police as if it were 100% undisputed fact that the accused did, in fact, commit the crime. Whether the person accused is guilty or not, (in the US at least), there is no hope for them once the press gets their hands on the story (just look at the whole story behind that Duke rape case here while back). Sometimes I think we in the US should adopt the policy they have in England with regards to press coverage of crimes.

Re:The sadest part of this is..

[Entropius]

Except if my boss is investigating me, *his* boss gets to know about it.

In this case, Congress' boss is the citizenry.

Terrible P2P Regulation Bill Will Be Fast-Tracked

[wufpak]

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.

Dear RIAA

[seeker_1us]

"the ridiculous statement was evidence of a need for controls on corporate media conglomorates to block the improper or illegal control of distribution channels to maintain a monopoly over content distribution."

There, fixed that for you.

Accidents do happen but .....

[Usagi_yo]

If you seriously think that this was inadvertent, they you should probably read more Machiavelli

Re:Terrible P2P Regulation Bill Will Be Fast-Track

[Renraku]

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.

Re:DRM here is good

[CSMatt]

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.

Re:No.

[causality]

The committee released a statement explaining how the document was leaked. They didn't "blame" P2P, they simply detailed how the document got where it is. If they had said that someone smuggled the document outside in their briefcase, would you interpret it as them attacking briefcases?

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.

Re:Why is this wrong?

[smoker2]

You must be american. Sharing is usually at least 2 way.