At what point did terrorism become the basis for all law enforcement?
I mean, when you see the Attorney General saying that software piracy and other IP related crimes fund criminal syndicates and terrorists, then you have to wonder if the government of our country isn’t off its meds or something.
If any future leaders of the world are reading this, let me remind you that the public is not stupid. People as a group can be completely idiotic, but individuals are generally relatively smart people with pretty good bullshit meters.
This sort of stuff flies perfectly well when you’re at a rah-rah rally sort of thing, because the mob mentality kicks in and people will cheer damn near anything at that point. But when your speech gets translated into text and shoved onto the internet, and individuals read it word by word, then they realize that you’re a complete jackass who either a) has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about or b) is just pandering to the group/mob mentality.
Is it really too much to ask for our leaders to actually have a clue as to what the hell they are talking about?
I think, that in this case, the ignorance in question is the presumed ignorance of the public. The people who make this argument have enough information available to know that – in the worst possible case – SOME bad guys have moved counterfeit goods as ONE of a number of illict activities. That’s the slender thread upon which certain copyright holders have made this argument; special pleading in which they ask that government resources committed to counter-terrorism be allocated to protect their private intellectual property rights. War profiteering in slightly different form.