Open-Source Terror

Is the RIAA a threat to national security? John Dvorak thinks so. Read:

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) may become indirectly responsible for our inability to stop the next terrorist attack on the US. Hear me out on this one. The association’s recent move to bust individuals, mostly students, for music trading will spark a movement toward anonymous computing unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Already two anonymous music swapping systems have appeared: Filetopia and Blubster. This is just the beginning.

We can expect to see the development of new stealth technologies that will be used routinely by everyone. A massive trend toward true Net anonymity will have repercussions that are all bad. Child porn rings will be harder to uncover. E-mail sources will be harder to find. Spam will rule. Virus coders will remain in the shadows. Terrorism can flourish in such an environment. And the RIAA still won’t win the battle over file swapping. But it will have set off a bad chain of events.

As always, I find Dvorak’s worries a little overblown. But let’s not forget that it isn’t just Congress that forgets about the Law of Unintended Consequences.