Senator: Let's monitor P2P for illegal files
Found on CNet News on Thursday, 17 April 2008
Senate Democrat on Wednesday said federal and local police should use custom software to monitor peer-to-peer networks for illegal activity, and he wants to spend $1 billion in tax dollars to help make that happen.
Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it's "pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation" simply by looking at file names.
But in about half its cases, for purposes of longer-term tracking, the software captures "unique serial numbers" from the person's computer and keeps a tally of how many allegedly illicit files that particular user is trading.
If they want to wiretap the traffic, their ingenious plan can be foiled by ticking that encryption checkbox of your P2P application. If they want to search for certain file names, quite a few people will start sharing legal movies which got renamed to "super underage orgy.mpg". if they actually do find an illegal video and manage to get the owner's address via a subpoena, then this person still can just be running e.g. a TOR exit node which isn't illegal. And what are "unique serial numbers"? I hope he doesn't mean MAC addresses or P2P userids, which can be changed in less than a minute.