Why for Hell's sake would Homeland Security play henchman to the MPAA and deal with movie piracy?

You naively think that the government and industry are separate. Well, they’re not.

The MPAA (and its ugly brother, the RIAA) have many members of Congress and the administration very high on the contribution list. When the MPAA wants something, they have only to call their buddies in the Government Copyright Mafia to go and break some legs.

This is what is known as Corporat-ocracy. Isn’t America great?

Wow searching through his cell phone and overall everything without a warrant.

He consented to the search, he didn’t have to. He could have said “I want a lawyer” and nothing else. It really seemed like he was just wanted to go home. They would have gotten a warrant if he forced the issue and he probably would have spent the night in jail and been fingerprinted and stripped and asked to bend over and cough.

I really hate the concept of Glass and don’t give a fuck if his privacy was violated. I’m sure he would happily violate my privacy using Glass.

They did not have enough people who did not know what to name a cactus to go after them.

The funny part is that recording video for longer than a few minutes is pretty brutal with Glass. It gets hot, and can only go about 30 minutes before the battery dies. And the quality would be shit. The camera isn’t all that great and when you take into account head movement the entire thing is stupid. I have watched TS versions of movies that were taken on a iPhone and they were watchable.

Entertainment represents, what, one-seventh of the US economy? It’s a stretch, but if the agency considers illegal downloads and piracy of films as acts endangering that major economic sector, then it will argue that the US is under economic attack and claim jurisdiction. If they can put something like this across to the American public, as Hoover did for the FBI in the early 1930’s by sensationalizing the exploits of a few local and regional criminal gangs, Homeland Security stands to gain by becoming better funded and better armed (with more and more rights-intrusive laws, electronic surveillance, and sophisticated military weaponry) within the government and against the civilian population.

This is perpetrated most energetically by law-and-order, small-government/non-intrusion politicians growing the ever-increasing law enforcement sector (The creeping privatization of which means valuable contracts) of same government with the collusion of this very stupid population which bent over oh so invitingly for the insertion of the Patriot Act in the first place.

You can damn near do anything with a populace that pays more attention to their votes for TV entertainers and Facebook “Likes” than they do the people who are supposed to represent them in their government.