US Government Pirates Media

[Defenestra]

Meh. I mean, sure, if any of the people downloading this stuff supported the US' bewilderingly unhinged intellecual property laws, then they're just plain hypocrites, but otherwise, I do not much care.

You folks familiar with Neil Gaiman's experiment? There's a video on youtube of him talking on that subject. And he did actually perform an experiment. Now, it's the kind of thing that should be carefully replicated a few times to be sure, but the results were interesting.

 

[Strazdas]

Well, first of all i would question their methods. the simple method to see ips is to pirate yourself, but then the method is illegal and cant be used in court. another one is to take the information from a tracker, in which case they needed to have a deal with a tracker. that is better. but not reliable. if i were to pirate, the tracker would see me as a house of prezidency of Lithuania, despite me not being anywhere near it. Ip spoofing for utorrent is not hard. Also, any decent tracker will already have automatic ban on all government IPs.

 

[Coffeejack]

What an absolute collection of fully-rigged, grade A, ocean-going pillocks.

They could have at least been downloading something watchable when they were caught.

 

[Therumancer]

Until that happens it's a clever jibe, but we actually have little evidence that a crime was committed. You could take the information as presented here and spin it a few differant ways. I could for example also imply with this data that a member of The House was bribed through being given the perk of free access to his favorite TV shows.

Interesting theory but quite incorrect. No legitimate internal source is going to use file names like "The.Good.Dinosaur.DVDRIP.XviD-ZEKTORM" or "CSI.NY.S09E04.Unspoken.HDTV.XviD-LOL[ettv]" - those are public or private tracker torrent file names, no question about it.

OT: I'd like to think this would be investigated. I'm not expecting politicians to be whiter than white but if they're stupid enough to use official government IPs for illegal activity (or to employ interns etc who do) then they deserve the discomfort and potential humiliation of an investigation, at the very least.

Oh sure, your probably right, there is no doubt of that. But at the same time it can be argued that politicians might be using torrents for the same reasons a lot of other people do including relative quality, file transfer speed based on where they happen to be, and other things. You could take any one of the thousands of defenses made legitimizing and defending torrents and use it to defend these people as easily as "Bob the downloader". It's like with ROMs, they exist in a legal gray area if you legitimatly own the cartridge, which is why so many sites have gotten away with distributing them publically over the years.

My point is that while pretty damning, nothing was actually proven here, to the point of it being meaningless. For all we know the guys DLing it have legitimate permission to access this media, and while it makes sense that they would want to get it from official services, there are theoretical reasons they might be using Rips from "The Pirate Bay".

I'm not defending the house, so much as saying that it seems more along the lines of speculative libel, encouraging people to read into something that isn't yet proven. While entertaining, I'm not always fond of such journalistic techniques since they can very easily backfire.

Or in short I'm just picking for the sake of having something to ramble about on The Internet.