That's how much federal money he wants to spend to monitor Peer-To-Peer networks for illegal activity:
A prominent Senate Democrat on Wednesday said federal and local police should use custom software to monitor peer-to-peer networks for illegal activity, and he wants to spend $1 billion in tax dollars to help make that happen.
At an afternoon Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about child exploitation on the Internet, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it's "pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation" simply by looking at file names. He urged use of those techniques by investigators to help nab the most egregious offenders.
Things that are easy always cost a billion dollars. You know, like Joe Biden's mom! Hi-oh! (Actually, she was like tree-fitty - Ed.)
So, how are they going to implement this?
Waters describes the system as a "comprehensive computer infrastructure," housed in Wyoming, that grants law enforcement officers a "big picture" of what sort of child pornography file transfers are going on across the country. It's able to help investigators conduct undercover operations involving peer-to-peer file-sharing applications, chat rooms, Web sites, and mobile telephones, Waters said.
Well, I'm sold. I can't even imagine a way in which this system could be used to invade privacy or nab offenders for a thousand other crimes that fall far short of the severity he's discussing here. I mean, when has the government ever taken a specifically granted power and abused it?
I'm all for brutally murdering every child pornographer, rapist and abuser in the world, don't get me wrong, but giving the government a huge infrastructure to monitor your web-use seems like maybe it might backfire in the future.
I could be wrong. Seriously, who else would even be interested in that information? Nobody.
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