{"id":492860,"date":"2010-03-31T01:43:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-31T05:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100326\/1835278745.shtml"},"modified":"2010-03-31T01:43:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-31T05:43:00","slug":"house-passes-ban-on-file-sharing-use-by-government-employees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/492860","title":{"rendered":"House Passes Ban On File Sharing Use By Government Employees"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a few years now, one of the tactics of the entertainment industry to get another foot in the legislative door towards outlawing file sharing programs, is to push ridiculous stories about how secret gov’t documents were showing up on file sharing networks<\/a>. Of course, there’s a reason why that’s happening: clueless gov’t staffers not being careful. But, in typical Congressional fashion, the response is to overreact, very much at the urging (and legislative guidance) of the entertainment industry. After trying for a few years, it looks like the industry has been marginally successful this time. Slashdot<\/a> points out that the House has passed legislation that would bar government employees from using file sharing<\/a>, but notes that the language of the bill is so broad that it likely forbids all sorts of useful applications.<\/p>\n

Of course, this was only passed in the House, and it looks like the Senate is going in a different direction — instead preferring an equally pointless bill that would require any file sharing software (again, so broadly worded that it would include browsers, FTP software, backup software, etc.) to pop up an alert<\/a> that you would have to click every time you opened the software.<\/p>\n

Hey Congress, here’s a better idea: instead of passing dumb laws with serious unintended consequences, why not have a bit of basic computer security training for your staffers so they don’t do idiotic things like putting top secret plans in a shared folder?<\/p>\n

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For a few years now, one of the tactics of the entertainment industry to get another foot in the legislative door towards outlawing file sharing programs, is to push ridiculous stories about how secret gov’t documents were showing up on file sharing networks. Of course, there’s a reason why that’s happening: clueless gov’t staffers not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-492860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492860\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}