Maven Mapper's

 The House of Representatives held a hearing this week and pulled the mother of all trump cards out to attack the Peer to Peer industry.  The government is accusing the P2P industry of being a threat to national security and they are lumping confidential corporate accounting documents in the mix.

They claim that sensitive documents are being shared on peer to Peer networks (like the governments unconstitutional domestic wiretapping activities).  They specifically call out a number of areas that do not seem to be related to government at all.  The list of topics includes:

• classified government military orders
• confidential corporate-accounting documents
• localized terrorist threat assessments
• personal information
• federal workers' credit card numbers
• bank statements
• tax returns
• medical records
• Congress: P2P networks harm national security | Tech News on ZDNet

Now, any one of these items might risk exposure on a P2P network or any other area of the internet for that matter, but it bothers me that the government is citing the networks as the risk.

Let's say that Limewire came across papers disclosing that President Bush at called for the detainment and torture of prisoners of war in Iraq and those papers had a very high classification on them.  The government should have been responsible enough to have kept those sensitive documents from being leaked. 

In regards to corporate documents, they too have a responsibility to keep documents safe.  In fact, this type of leak often is the thing in the corporate world that exposes corruption.

When you see those two topics put together by a Republican in Congress calling out the holy concept of national security it makes me suspicious that they may have something to hide, possibly even a scandal of their own.

The truth is that the world is rapidly opening up and becoming more and more transparent.  The politicians need to learn this and learn how to adapt to running a super power in a world where information travels at the speed of light.

You push a button and the world sees your order.  Complete some sensitive market research and sooner or later others are going to learn the same thing. Collude with a corporation and some day soon it will be exposed. Have an affair with a prostitute and the phone records will become public. Stash $90,000 in your freezer and it will probably show up on YouTube.