Lawmakers Caught Again By File-Sharing Software 203
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."
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ahh...I love politics.
Connections (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Oops!... I Did It Again (Score:2, Insightful)
The sadest part of this is.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The sadest part of this is.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Connections (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Don't need P2P for these problems (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Connections (Score:5, Insightful)
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:The sadest part of this is.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Then why does congress get this kind of protection when private citizens suspected of a crime do not?
Doesn't this actually show (Score:2, Insightful)
...the need for more ethical members of Congress?
Terrible P2P Regulation Bill Will Be Fast-Tracked (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [loc.gov]. It just passed out of committee [govtrack.us] 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 (Score:4, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you.
Re:The sadest part of this is.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Accidents do happen but ..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The sadest part of this is.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Wish I knew. I do, however, think the answer is "protect private citizens too," not "take away congress' protection."
Yep, networks are awful things (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Keep leak mechanics quiet. (Score:1, Insightful)
I think "politician" is the most derogatory name you can call someone.
I always thought it was 'nigger'.
Re:Connections (Score:2, Insightful)
In my experience, politicians are a lot more likely to seek out expert advice in an area contributing to their campaign than techie are.
Fixed that for you.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
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?"
P2P = "Open Information Network" (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Connections (Score:3, Insightful)
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. In my experience, politicans are a lot more likely to seek out expert advice in an area outside their realm than techie are.
There's one big problem with that. If they are thinking about, say, a law concerning file-sharing, the expert advice is going to come from someone who works in the IT industry, likely from an ISP. The interests of the ISP can differ from the interests of its users. So once again it's about authority and not knowledge, in this case the authority being credentials gained by having an institution or a company behind you. It's one reason why the law is so often biased in favor of corporations and other large organizations.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:The sadest part of this is.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except if my boss is investigating me, *his* boss gets to know about it.
In this case, Congress' boss is the citizenry.
Nothing to do with P2P!! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Connections (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Connections (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Terrible P2P Regulation Bill Will Be Fast-Track (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Connections (Score:5, Insightful)
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:DRM here is good (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
can't blame p2p software (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Connections (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Terrible P2P Regulation Bill Will Be Fast-Track (Score:2, Insightful)
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 [wired.com] in ways that clearly exceed the legislative intent [thedailybeast.com], 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.
Re:Why is this wrong? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why is this wrong? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Keep leak mechanics quiet. (Score:1, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Terrible P2P Regulation Bill Will Be Fast-Track (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
Re:The sadest part of this is.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Except if my boss is investigating me, *his* boss gets to know about it.
In this case, Congress' boss is the citizenry.
Try telling them that.
Re:Why is this wrong? (Score:1, Insightful)
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...
Re:The sadest part of this is.. (Score:2, Insightful)
I find it disturbing that just because an adult is accused of a crime, they release their names in the media. I feel it should be kept secret until the result of the jury trial.
Blaming the software? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.