How does file sharing have anything to do with Homeland Security?

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: We've been quite concerned about the legality of Homeland
: Security's domain name seizures - especially in cases where they
: took down sites that had a ton of legitimate content, such as
: various hip hop blogs, with no due process and no adversarial
: hearings. One other concern was where Homeland Security's
: direction on this was coming from. As we noted, in an earlier
: similar domain name seizure situation, Homeland Security
: announced the seizures from Disney's headquarters - which should
: raise lots of eyebrows. As we said at the time, imagine any
: other government agency announcing a third party action that
: benefits a particular company from that company's offices. For
: example, imagine the FTC announcing antitrust actions against
: Google from Microsoft's offices. Wouldn't people question the
: legitimacy of that?
:
: Well, apparently, Homeland Security and the folks in its
: Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) group have no qualms
: at all about being quite upfront and frank about both the fact
: that they're acting as Hollywood's private police force and that
: they have little concern for due process. Entertainment Weekly
: spoke with Erik Barnett, the "assistant deputy
: director" for ICE, and he readily admitted that they were
: taking orders from the industry:
:
: "In general, what we can say is, there are specific
: complaints from rights holders that these sites were infringing
: on copyrights."
:
: That alone should give you pause. Rights holders have a long and
: very detailed history of greatly over-exaggerating when their
: rights were supposedly being "infringed" upon.
: Remember Jack Valenti of the MPAA claiming that the VCR was the
: Boston Strangler to the movie industry? Why didn't Customs
: "swoop in" and block all VCRs from being sold? Why?
: Because that would be ridiculous. So why is it effectively doing
: the exact same thing here?
:
: As for due process, Barnett apparently doesn't care, and
: pretends that due process is basically ICE says you're guilty,
: so you are:
:
: "I mean, when we're conducting criminal investigations,
: we don't notify criminals that you need to abate your criminal
: conduct or there's going to be an enforcement action against
: you," says Barnett. He is not particularly sympathetic to
: bloggers who might feel that the shutdowns have damaged their
: livelihoods without due process. "I understand that this is
: a question that gets raised," he says. "But from a law
: enforcement agency standpoint, there's criminal activity. The
: process that's set up to address that is a law enforcement
: agency investigates, which is what Homeland Security
: Investigations does. The Justice Department determines if the
: elements of the criminal statute have been met. And then a judge
: determines if the enforcement action that's proposed - in this
: case, a seizure warrant - is appropriate. So that's the
: process."
:
: Notice he never mentions an actual trial where the other side
: gets to put forth its arguments. Of course, for those of us who
: actually understand due process - as opposed to just Barnett's
: cowboy process, we understand that normally you have an
: adversarial hearing where the other side gets to present its
: case before summarily being declared guilty. If there's
: "criminal activity" (and even that's questionable - as
: it's difficult to see how what these blogs did goes beyond civil
: infringement, if it really was infringing at all), then you
: arrest them and put them on trial. You don't just seize the
: domains.
:
: Barnett also claims that this is no different than Customs
: seizing shipments of counterfeit goods as they enter the US, but
: that's a huge stretch. Customs' job is to guard what crosses the
: borders. That's it. Seizing entire domain names because there
: may be some infringing material on the site (which, again, was
: never established at a trial) has absolutely nothing to do with
: protecting the borders. And the very fact that Barnett's already
: admitted to relying on the industry's say so that these things
: are infringing is downright scary. Why are our tax dollars being
: used to protect legacy entertainment industry companies that
: refuse to adapt?
:
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