If you’re at all plugged in to the ‘net, the LulzSec (Anonymous) group has been extremely busy lately. They promise to be more active on January 3rd.
This post is not commentary about the legitimacy of their actions save one thing:
The hackers prove that laws won’t stop piracy or hacking. If something is out there, it is likely to be hacked. Why? It’s a challenge for a developer to break something, to develop a build a different representation of it. It’s a mountain to be climbed. A coder is going to do it elegantly or by brute force. For some, it doesn’t matter.
There are many examples of hacking (we used to call it phrackin’) from banks all the way down to, in a way, Makers. Those geeky little guys in their basement taking apart a Roomba or even me, trying to figure out the minimum number of lines of Objective C with the tiniest memory footprint to do a parallax as a gift to a friend (you know who you are..)
Anyway, with respect to SOPA/PIPA and all of the other paranoiac silliness out there, it’s a waste. Creating additional measures to fight Piracy is redundant and pointless. Pirates are out there and they always will be. People wanting to make a quick buck from a pirated movie? A pirated track? They’ll always be there.
Anonymous/LulzSec proves that. They’re going to do what they do (most hackers have a mission and vision, and like anyone else, their idea of reality and values) and like IP pirates, only a tiny fraction of them get prosecuted.
The real question is: Knowing this, what is the point of SOPA and PIPA? The potential threat to personal liberties and the first amendment is too great for these to be written into law. Someone is going to get hurt by it. One person getting hurt is one too many.
Now, with NDAA, one person getting disappeared is one to many.
A nightmare scenario:
A pirate is deemed a hacker because that’s how they got their links around DNSSEC. They doing so, they can be deemed a threat to national security. They get disappeared when they were only scamming on CDs and DVDs. Poof. For some, I would expect to say that the punishment fits the crime. I don’t think so…
The coming weeks are going to be interesting. I know one thing. I’ll make every effort I can not to consume SOPA supporter media. I’d like to suggest you do the same.
