Congress wants another look at filesharing
A Congressional committee is reopening a 2007 investigation of peer-to-peer filesharing services. It is looking at security rather than copyright issues.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is targeting direct sharing services, notably LimeWire, rather than bit torrent directories. The committee’s concern is that users may inadvertently be sharing sensitive files through such services.
In a letter to the Lime Group, the firm behind LimeWire, the committee noted witnesses from the 2007 hearings “easily obtained bank records, health records, military files, tax returns, corporate documents, and other highly sensitive private files via the LimeWire network”. The committee accuses the Lime Group of failing to live up to promises to change the service to make this less likely to happen.
The hearing follows numerous cases of documents being unintentionally shared, the most high-profile being a contractor employee mistakenly sharing documents about a helicopter in the Presidential fleet. Those documents were then downloaded by a user in Iran.
A spokeswoman for LimeWire said the firm has worked with rivals to improve security and noted the latest edition of the software excludes document files from sharing by default.
Matthew Lasar of Arstechnica notes that this is simply the latest move in a long-running sage of government demanding, in vain, that filesharing security be improved. The committee first held hearings into the issue as far back as 2003, while the US Patent and Trademark Office described filesharing services as being “uniquely dangerous” in allowing users to mistakenly share data.
Clearly firms should, as a matter of good practice, set up their software so that users only share files or folders they have explicitly selected to make available. And certainly it doesn’t do any harm for officials to highlight the dangers of sharing sensitive documents.
But congressional involvement seems to be destined to failure for a simple reason: it’s virtually impossible to regulate against stupidity.
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