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| Piracy funds terror???
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ds-terror.html Quote:
US Attorney General: Piracy funds terror
By Nate Anderson | Published: March 31, 2008 - 01:12AM CT
One downside of being the US Attorney General, especially in the current administration? You have to talk about terrorism. A lot.
Five sentences into a speech on Friday at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, Attorney General Michael Mukasey was already waxing eloquent about how technology could help an "international terrorist looking to advance a murderous plot." Moments later, he was outlining the ways in which "criminal syndicates, and in some cases even terrorist groups, view IP crime as a lucrative business, and see it as a low-risk way to fund other activities."
Who are these terrorists that fund operations by selling DVDs from the side of the road? Mukasey, who presumably knows, isn't saying, so you'll have to take his word for it. The examples that he did give were about criminals who wanted to make a boatload of cash, not finance the death of innocents in crowded squares, but we'll cut Mukasey some slack here for one simple reason: he managed to make it through an entire speech on crime and intellectual property without suggesting that noncommercial P2P file-swappers are somehow equivalent to criminal gangs running huge Asian stamping operations.
The distinction isn't particularly subtle, but trade groups tend to elide the differences between the two groups by branding them both with the same label. Mukasey's speech, which ran down the various initiatives that the US has in place to curb identity theft, counterfeiting, and computer software piracy, focused on commercial piracy and counterfeiting. He described, for instance, a bust in San Jose in which "two leaders of a software piracy ring were each sentenced to more than three years in prison as a result of an investigation that netted almost half a million counterfeit music, movie, and software discs."
The most interesting moment in the speech, though, came when Mukasey discussed the US commitment to rooting out hackers long considered untouchable. These are people from places like Russia and Romania, where education remains good but law enforcement can be lacking, especially when it comes to prosecuting crimes that don't affect other Russians or Romanians.
"For example," he said, "based on close cooperation between the Department, the FBI, and Romanian authorities, prosecutors from that country's Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism arrested eleven Romanian citizens on fraud and identity theft charges last November. They were part of a criminal organization that specialized in 'phishing' information from computer users, imprinting credit and debit card information onto counterfeit cards, and then using those cards to obtain cash from ATMs and Western Union locations. Romanian police officers executed 21 search warrants and seized computers, card reading and writing devices, blank cards, and other equipment." And more power to them.
To keep such prosecutions coming, the Department of Justice has also stationed "IP Law Enforcement Coordinators" in Thailand and Bulgaria. We first mentioned this initiative last year, back when Alberto Gonzales was still running Justice. At the time, we noted that Gonzales also had the right focus in his speech, targeting commercial counterfeiters and hackers at home and abroad.
In fact, despite pressure from the music and movie businesses, the Department of Justice has basically stayed clear of the file-swapping issue, despite the fact that it would not be technically difficult to charge high-volume P2P users with criminal charges. Instead, though, Justice has focused on actual counterfeiters and pirates, leaving industry to deal with noncommercial file-swapping as it sees fit (the RIAA has famously elected to file thousands of civil cases).
Mukasey's speech, given that it was all about intellectual property, seems to follow the same tack. The focus of the talk was on busting hackers who prey on Americans, software pirates moving thousands or millions of copies of commercial software at big profit margins, and counterfeiters who make counterfeit Stihl chainsaw parts ("think for a minute about the threat to health and safety—literally life and limb—posed by an inferior knock-off chainsaw guard or chain," Mukasey said, so I did. Not only do the terrorists finance their operations, but they take off the best of America's pinky fingers in the process. How diabolically brilliant.)
While we at Ars don't endorse illicit file-swapping, we do think there has got to be a better way to deal with the issue than by either criminalizing millions of Americans or squeezing them for thousands of dollars, and it's heartening to see that the "public's lawyer" has his focus on the right place.
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03-31-08, 02:51 PM
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