Never mind the child porn, stop the music pirates?

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

Six of the UK’s biggest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have agreed a plan with the music industry to tackle piracy online. The deal, negotiated by the government—after it blackmailed all ISPs that if they didn’t act, it would, to legislate—will see hundreds of thousands of letters sent to those suspected of illegally sharing music. For the music industry, however, this does not go far enough—they want all access to the Internet cut off for people who ignore repeated warnings, something the ISPs say they are not prepared to do.

The half-baked not-joined-up thinking has resulted in a glaring and shockingly telling inconsistency: if ISPs are to be responsible for music pirates, why no push for them to be held accountable for paedophiles and terrorists uploading and downloading illegal content as well? Why are kids downloading Kylie tracks first in line to be threatened and punished, rather than paedophiles sharing abusive images and videos of children, or wannabe terrorists?

Simply put, paedophiles can’t be redirected to inject cash into the economy by buying their favourite disgusting downloads instead of getting them for free. The same goes for terrorists. And so, in brutal capitalist terms, we see clearly now that music pirates are far more important to tackle than the adults who sexually predate on the nation’s children, and those who seek to blow us all up while we’re out and about in our towns and cities.

We have, after all, been told that there are limited resources available to government and police. Millions if not billions have been assigned to date to special police units investigating child pornography rings, and terrorist networks, while we have all read the stories that tell us it is impossible to track every offender, every abusive file, every serious bomb-making discussion taking place online. This is either a lie, or the measures to be announced today by ISPs to scare their paying customers are nothing more than hot air and accusations predicated on the notion that we are guilty until proven innocent—because it is not possible to identify in the overwhelming majority of circumstances what specific files are being downloaded using peer-to-peer filesharing software.

It is also considerably easier to write a letter accusing people of illegally downloading music than it is to do the same where child pornography and terrorist activities are concerned. And yet we can be bundled into the back of police vans and detained for days in police cells for taking photographs of the Houses of Parliament; we can be arrested, as happened this week with one poor family, on the suspicion that a mother’s physically and mentally handicapped son, being of mixed race and the mother white, is not her own but a child being illegally trafficked into the UK via the Channel Tunnel crossing. Both these marvellous examples of how the State works hard to protect us—sorry, intimidate and accuse us—are down to the new powers granted to police under the Terrorism Act. And all without an insane Islamic fundamentalist in sight, and absolutely no mention whatsoever of Osama bin Laden. 

The same Act also allows legitimate political protest, particularly if it has an environmental angle, to be monitored, manipulated, and—if deemed necessary by the government in order to appease its friends in big business, including the nuclear industry—prevented from taking place at all, or stamped upon, on the dubious grounds of ‘maintaining public safety’ when, in reality, the Terrorism Act is about controlling the British people, what we can do, what we can say. It has, to be blunt, fuck all to do with terrorism.

The tragic events of 9/11 and the July 7 bombings gave a gift-horse to politicians and shadowy behind-the-scenes concerns in both the US and UK. They made the appropriate noises about loss of life, and talked tough on dealing with the perpetrators, but the legislation ushered in on both sides of the Atlantic had, as its primary focus, a driving need to manipulate our societies and make us more fearful. Because when you fear, you are easier to control and far more likely to do as you are told. 

You may wonder what legislation, civil liberties, terrorism and child porn have to do with illegally downloading music files. If so, I’m sorry to say you’ve failed to join up the dots and see the big picture. All these are inextricably linked, and together reveal the things that are most important to industry, and to government. The people don’t figure at all, other than getting in the way from time to time and being damned annoying in exercising free will even when our rights to do that have been curtailed, and continue to be eroded. 

Your children don’t matter, and neither do you matter if you get blown to pieces. What’s important is what has always been important, but becomes even more so as planetary resources such as oil, gas, water, and food begin to either run out or grow increasingly expensive. Popular revolt starts with unrest leading to changes imposed by where we place our marks at the ballot box in supposed democracies; but the fear of those who hold the strings of the economy, and hold political power, is that popular revolt over petrol prices and food shortages—in some countries we’ve already seen food riots—will escalate into full-blown revolution.

The legislative groundwork is being laid, ever since 9/11, to ensure that, when the time comes, our leaders and the tools of state—the army, the navy, the police—will be able to act decisively against their own citizens in order to maintain power and the rule of law as an iron fist. Don’t say you haven’t been warned. And if you get a letter from your ISP, remember it’s the not-so-thin edge of the wedge, and write one of your own back to your ISP’s legal department telling them that unless they can provide proof of what you’re supposed to have downloaded, to shut the fuck up or face court action themselves.

categories: choons, in the news