It has been all over the news: the French government has passed a law (HADOPI) that gives an agency the power to cut off your Internet access if you download illegal content, without a court order or the intervention of a judge.
One of the legacies of the Enlightment is the idea that you can isolate object and subject, that you can decompose reality into its parts (deterministic) and recompose it again, that you can change one parameter while everything else stays constant. This fallacy is widespread and leads to “unintended consequences”: big surprises.
As most likely in this case.
The detection methods and identification methods of illegal downloaders rely on IP-adresses and checking packets. The “digital natives” are very aware of ways to bypass these methods (such as widely available VPN services that for instance bypass geographical lockouts for services like Hulu. Usenet is quite popular as well).
The geeks can go one step further and spoof IP-adresses, taking over someone elses identity (if you rely on an IP-adress). So what would be more satisfying than to:
- get hold of the IP-adress of a celebrity, minister, judge who is a supporter of HADOPI and is a naieve “digital tourist”
- get a bot to spoof this adress and start to download continuously illegal content
- expose the illegal downloads in the press and ask the agency to shut down the celebrity or politician
How long will it take before we see the first politicians trying to explain in public that they did not download as recorded?
