Verbosities

Excusing, for a moment, the invocation of Orwell in the title of the post I'm linking below, when are we as a people going to decide that we're going to draw a line on how far the government can go in their domestic eavesdropping?



Gonzales proposing new Orwellian thought crimes law - AMERICAblog: A great nation deserves the truth

At what point do these so-called conservatives out there plan to speak up against this crap?

From CNet, then my analysis:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual-property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including "attempts" to commit piracy.... The Bush administration is throwing its support behind a proposal called the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007, which is likely to receive the enthusiastic support of the movie and music industries, and would represent the most dramatic rewrite of copyright law since a 2005 measure dealing with prerelease piracy....

The IPPA would, for instance:

* Criminalize "attempting" to infringe copyright. Federal law currently punishes not-for-profit copyright infringement with between 1 and 10 years in prison, but there has to be actual infringement that takes place....

* Permit more wiretaps for piracy investigations. Wiretaps would be authorized for investigations of Americans who are "attempting" to infringe copyrights....

* Allow computers to be seized more readily. Specifically, property such as a PC "intended to be used in any manner" to commit a copyright crime would be subject to forfeiture, including civil asset forfeiture....

* Require Homeland Security to alert the Recording Industry Association of America. That would happen when CDs with "unauthorized fixations of the sounds, or sounds and images, of a live musical performance" are attempted to be imported.

Oh where to begin?

First off, what this legislation is really about: The Homeland Security department getting carte blanche authorization to fish through your computer and tap your phones with impunity, whenever they want, so long as they argue that they think you might have ever tried to download even a single song via Limewire or some of other music-sharing software, or have ever copied a photo off the Internet, or even watched a single clip from any TV show on YouTube. They're going to use this legislation to hunt for terrorists, and won't need search warrants, etc. That's what this is about.

Take off your partisan cheerleader sweater and drop the pom-pons for a second. Someday there will be an administration in office with whom you do not blindly agree, and someday that administration is going to take a law like this and use it as a blanket excuse to do something with which you do not agree. Something like blackmailing a political opponent, digging up dirt on a journalist, or ginning up charges against an opposition group perhaps. It doesn't even have to be an administration either, in these days of NSL abuse it could be a bureaucrat in a non-elected/non-appointed position in an intelligence agency digging up dirt on his ex-girlfriend for all we know.

Terrorism is a problem, but it's sold to us as a much larger problem than it really is. Septicemia and nephritis have killed more people per year than terrorism ever has, and I don't even know what those things are! You're not going to find anyone besides the staunchest and most pure libertarians out there who believes we shouldn't improve our ability and agility to protect ourselves through intelligence, I concede this point gladly. But what is it about us as a people at this point of world history that is causing us to give in to our most basic authoritarian impulses?

Why in god's name in this post-Watergate era should we ever trust the government to always protect our privacy and never abuse the myriad of powers we seem to be willing to grant them to do whatever the hell they have to do without warrants or oversight?

I've got one piece of advice for the DOJ and Homeland Security: Spin your wheels fighting nephritis instead. It sounds really awful and scary, and maybe we can fix that without giving a bureaucrat the ability to see what his downstairs neighbor is downloading off the Internet.

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