Kerry Howley discovers the industry advocates who say buying knock-off designer goods fuels terrorism and the journalists gullible enough to swallow it. There's something really pathetic about the extent to which America has been willing to lie down for a lot of obviously farcical "terror, terror, terror" business. I try to take the whole al-Qaeda thing seriously; I recommend Daniel Byman's book on fighting violent jihad. But then you get something preposterous like the "no liquids on a plane" rule but, hey, this turns out to be good news for the guys who sell overpriced water and soda past the security checkpoints so why not leave the rule in place and let's all agree to pretend its about security and not money.
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The War on Intellectual Property Violations
06 Dec 2007 10:11 am
Comments (8)
The topic of this thread seems very closely related to those of the various interminable threads on "IQ issues"...
I was blessed with the world's only really cynical high school civics textbook (written by James Q. Wilson, who turns out to be a crank, but boy, he wrote a great textbook), and there was a fun little sidebar about government spending in world war two, and how circa 1941 through 1943 everybody receiving government money frantically argued that the subsidies they'd been receiving for years needed to be continued in the name of national security. I vividly remember some sort of memo sent by a lobbying group for America's reindeer farmers, explaining all the ways that reindeer were crucial for beating the japanese.
For more on this, just read cybercrime.gov, or other press releases on usdoj.gov. The intellectual property (including common, widespread internet music piracy) supporting terrorism talking point is constantly disseminated in their press releases. This has been a major, and unfortunately under-examined, aspect of the Ashcroft years, which Gonzalez certainly continued.
To be fair, the "no liquids on a plane" rule is also used to fuel the illusion of doing something -- it's good security theater. It's not only about money: it's about money and false security. Sort of a two-fer.
I'll bet that the shoe industry lobbyists came pretty close to requiring everyone to discard and replace their shoes with new "verified" ones every time they board a flight...
Stephen Frug is right that the security theater is partly about "doing something." It's also a way to instill fear so people will continue to support the "war on terror". A neat trick--make people feel safe by "doing something" and also remind them that there's a lot to be scared of.
I fear the day when a group of Islamic teenagers somewhere are arrested for plotting to smuggle C4 onto airplanes in their rectal cavities.
It always amuses me to watch the movie "Hackers" - which came out well before 9/11 - and hear Secret Service agent Richard Gill repeatedly going before media cameras and proclaiming (in the exact same prepared speech every time) that "these people...they're terrorists..." as his agents haul away some fifteen-year-old kid...
The best part of the movie is when the hackers make his life hell by ruining his credit, getting him phone calls from perverts, setting him up for arrest for 300 DUI violations, and having the Secret Service payroll department database declare him "deceased".
Also, notice how you hardly ever hear about the fact that since the invasion of Afghanistan, the heroin trade there has sky-rocketed - reportedly with the connivance of Porter Goss's relatives in Switzerland - or the fact that CIA rendition planes have been captured recently in Mexico and South America with tons of cocaine on board. During Vietnam, and George Bush Sr.'s connection with the CIA, tons of heroin came straight into the Oakland air base. Not to mention the Iran-Contra affair where the CIA was involved in drugs in Los Angeles.
Anybody who thinks the CIA isn't deeply involved with the drug trade is seriously deluded.
And we're supposed to be worried about intellectual property ripoffs funding terrorism?
Right. When somebody detonates a nuke on US soil and somebody credible proves that it was funded by selling bootleg copies of Andrea Corr's "Ten Feet High" album, maybe I'll be concerned.
Not.
Comments closed December 20, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
A couple of years ago, the Department of Homeland Security got involved in stopping counterfeit souvenirs around the MLB all star game in Detroit. The theory was that money from illegal caps could be used to fund terrorism.
Posted by wph | December 6, 2007 10:25 AM