Zeal For Truth

On July 24, 2007, the united brain trust of Capital Hill organized to discuss the newest threat to national security: your laptop. According to a CNET News article:

Politicians charged on Tuesday that peer-to-peer networks can pose a “national security threat” because they enable federal employees to share sensitive or classified documents accidentally from their computers.

At a hearing on the topic, Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said, without offering details, that he is considering new laws aimed at addressing the problem. He said he was troubled by the possibility that foreign governments, terrorists or organized crime could gain access to documents that reveal national secrets.

Let’s not talk about the fact that holding classified documents that threaten national security on a personal computer (or even work computer) loaded with P2P software is already a big no-no, but it’s also a stretch, considering that most file-sharing programs come pre-loaded with safeguards that precede each action with warnings about sharing certain folders. Yet, according to Thomas Sydnor, an attorney-advisor in the Patent Office’s copyright group, it isn’t enough. He claims that users aren’t just mistaken into sharing files, but are tricked into sharing private information that the user never intended to make public. Yet fret not, for according to Syndor, this “inadvertent sharing” is reason enough for new regulations, not just for national security, but for the protection of American citizens.

Right now - and completely unknown to them – Americans are sharing sensitive personal
data—their bank records, credit-card numbers, passwords, tax returns, and letters, to
name a few. Without their knowledge, businesses are sharing confidential data about
their customers, employees, and strategic plans. Federal, state, and local governments are
also affected—and sensitive data has been exposed. Worse yet, Internet criminals know
this, and they are data-mining filesharing networks.

*Note: The incident he is referring too was the case of a Department of Transportation worker who’s daughter installed LimeWire, a popular P2P software, on her work computer and accidentally shared non-classified documents on the network.*

While such things are capable, does further regulation of a private industry need to proceed simply due to the possibility of misuse? Well according to Rep. Jim Cooper (R-TN), it goes a step beyond mere use, and places the blame squarely on the code-writers. In this case Gorton, CEO of LimeWire:

“I’d feel more than a shade of guilt at this point, having made the laptop a dangerous weapon against the security of the United States,” Cooper said. “Mr. Gorton, you seem to lack imagination about how your product can be deliberately misused by evildoers against this country.” (Cooper also, at one point, claimed that Gorton’s own home computer was probably leaking sensitive documents.)

Cooper went on to accuse Gorton of making the “skeleton keys” that “grant access to material harmful to U.S. national security.”
(For more such lovely gems, you can read further here.)

This is a dangerous line we are crossing, for where does it end? If the possible potential for misuse of a free computer program sounds the alarms of regulation in the name of threatened national security, where will it lead to next? As a nation that bases many decisions on precedence, this should sound some alarms in the heads of the citizens. Yet, this is the consequence of a nation bent on letting the state save us from ourselves. Perhaps Rep. Cooper and the rest of his ilk would fare well to remember the words of Seneca, in his letters to Lucilus when he said: “Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est.” (Latin: “A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.”)