Greetings. The Bush administration has proposed a sweeping expansion of copyright infringement "criminalization" -- including more wiretap authority and involvement by the Department of Homeland Security. Yes, this is copyright we're talking about gang, not Al-Qaeda.

My initial reaction to the Bush proposal was to consider it a bizarre and potentially dangerous augmentation of already over-entrenched IP rights, suggesting that the RIAA and MPAA seem to actually have the kind of influence over our government that conspiracy theorists have long attributed to the Illuminati.

But then I realized that there's a bright side. Since the proposal would turn the Department of Homeland Security into a Compact Disc/RIAA watchdog agency, this suggests that all the doom and gloom we hear about budget and management problems at DHS must have been fixed! Otherwise, nobody in their right mind would propose adding copyright policing to their mandate.

And now we can finally understand why there's been the big push to force the inclusion of wiretapping/monitoring capabilities in virtually all phone systems and computer networks. We always figured that such broad requirements didn't make sense just for fighting terrorism and violent crime. But now we can see the light -- it's for keeping tabs on all those college kids and their evil file sharing!

Wow, it's great to know that the Bush team has finally gotten their act together when it comes to allocating scarce resources. I guess we can all sleep much better from now on.

--Lauren--