What the hell are we letting the government do to this country?
I've given the Republicans a fairly good thrashing over the past few years due to the innumerable many stupid things they've done. They mostly got this attention because they happened to be in control of the government. Today we get to turn our attention to the equally incompetent Democratic party:
The College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 (Copy of the text here. See pages 382 and 412), introduced to the House of Representatives on November 9 by Representatives Miller (D-CA) and Hinojosa (D-TX), has provisions in it to cut federal financial aid to all students of any university/college that refuses or is unable to implement technology aimed to spy on students in order to track and stop copyright infringement. In addition to this it would become mandatory for these institutions to either pay a "royalty fee" (also known as extortion) to the MPAA/RIAA for works that may have been and might be illegally copied over their infrastructure, or "provide" students with access to a fee-based service such as the new Napster, iTunes, or some other such garbage riddled system.
Are you kidding me?!
The RIAA/MPAA actually have (at least) these two "representatives" in their pockets, completely. They want to threaten colleges for not policing copyright infringement. That's so utterly ridiculous that I can't even come up with a suitably absurd analogy to compare it to, but here's a shot anyways: it's like cutting off financial aid to all students of any university that fails to arrest and prosecute all jaywalkers.
We all know BYU already has lots of systems and monitoring in place to deter illegal file-sharing via the BYU network, so they're probably already compliant with the provisions of this bill. I'm not upset with the monitoring itself, I know BYU does this, I choose to be at BYU, and I also choose not to live in BYU housing. But turning this into a demand and threat is absolutely unacceptable. The government has no place making these kind of broad sweeping threats against patrons of an institution due to the private actions of some of its patrons. What kind of justice would it be to cut off federal financial aid to 33,739 students because some handful of the 6,748 students living on-campus participate in illegal activities (statistics from UtahMentor.org). Even if every single one of the students living in on-campus housing were violating copyright infringement laws the law would still punish almost 27,000 students for something they had no control over or participation in.
Absolutely unacceptable.
Sadly, the daily disappointments in the government don't end there.
Back to the Republicans, specifically Darth Vader, err Dick Cheney (Hey, he dressed up as Darth Vader for Halloween so that's not a arbitrary potshot). Apparently the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran has been delayed by the White House (Dick Cheney's office) for over a year specifically because the information it contains does not support attacking Iran. Yup, the people in charge of drafting the report (which combines the intelligence efforts of 16 agencies) were told to rewrite it until the dissenting opinions about Iran were eradicated. Fortunately for us (finally), some of the people involved didn't think this would be appropriate and have not only refused to remove the information that doesn't support the current rhetoric, but have come out to the press to tell the world what's happening. This type of selective information reporting is disgusting. It's the same run-up to the Iraq invasion: falsified intelligence documents, continual lying to the American people and the world... the propaganda machine is in full swing. And for some reason the American people are buying it. The latest poll results that I have seen show that more than 50% of those polled are in support for attacking Iran. Are you people insane?! Have you not learned that we're already neck deep in our screw-ups?
But let's move on to yet another disturbing move by someone in this administration: (How I wish I didn't have this many things to be angry about).
Donald Kerr, Director of the National Reconnaissance Office, (and currently principle deputy director of national intelligence) says we need to adjust our definition of privacy to fit the government's. Which is, according to him, that no longer does privacy mean anonymity; privacy means something to the effect of "The government knows everything about you, so just trust them to use that information responsibly". I don't know what language he speaks, but I'm pretty sure he just defined "trust", heck it's right there in the sentence. I want my version of privacy specifically because I can't trust the government.
The problem, according to Kerr's line of thought, isn't that government and businesses may have intricately detailed information about citizens, or that they might be actively working to collect such data as part of an extensive program of electronic surveillance. The concerns, Kerr says, should be focused on how such data is safeguarded and how Americans view the importance of that data.
No, the issue isn't how that data is "safeguarded" the issue is that you have no right or reason to have detailed personal information about what I buy, where I travel, with whom I speak, or when I do these things. And until I've broken a law and was found guilty by a jury of my peers you have no reason to know anything about me, other than that I exist.
The people running this government are absolutely un-freaking-believable.
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