Attorney General: When You Download, You Download With Osama
One downside of being the in the current administration? You have to talk about terrorism. A lot.According to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, DVD piracy and illegal downloading are funding terrorist networks around the globe. Which ones? He won’t say.
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080331-us-attorney-general-piracy-funds-terror.html
Leave a Reply