They don't call it theft, actually

The BBC got called on their error when they claimed on the air that filesharing, specifically copyright infringement, is theft. Hear their laudable and surprisingly transparent recovery here which notes, among other things, that

File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong and has unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases. We know that script line was wrong. It was a mistake. We're very, very sorry.

Here's the paragraph for which I particularly applaud them, though:

Railways and canals

Now we've got that out the way, let us ask you a question. Why is it that every time the media starts to talk about the internet they feel compelled to bang on about paedophiles and terrorists and generally come over like a cross between Joe McCarthy and the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?

Well here's one answer - it sells copy. Another answer is that we're totally scared of new media, because new media is railways and we're canals, and you all just know how that's going to end.

So we seek to equate the internet with all bad things to scare you off it. At some corporate freudian level, there's some truth to that accusation.

They ultimately retreat to the position that if filesharing goes encrypted the flood of encrypted traffic will prevent the government from effectively monitoring what goes on on the internet and baddies will be impossible to track.

I hear their point, but I think it's still a little misguided. First of all, any criminal worth catching is using some serious encryption. Now of course, much of this is still breakable by law enforcement, but it takes a huge amount of time and processing power, and given that many non-criminals(in fact, probasbly far more than criminals)use strong encryption for business or personal reasons it is probably already beyond feasibility for the government(s) to be monitoring strongly encrypted data at present.

Secondly, these people don't seem to understand how much encryption is already in use. Every time someone accesses a bank online, every time someone uses a secure website or any secure method of sending email, IM's, or files, and in the case of many games played online(to prevent cheating)there is encryption going on. Unless the governments of our various countries can afford more processing power than all the regular users in the world put together, it is fairly unlikely that they are able to monitor even the loosely encrypted communication going on over the web.

Most importantly, however, they have missed the primary point: the vast majority of encryption is not done for nefarious means. The reason ecnryption is so available is that it does have so many legitimate uses in generally making information processing and transfer mor effective. In the online world of a decade ago, this concern might have been relevant, but today it's simply not realistic. Ultimately, this concern is totally misplaced. The secure online world came and went a long time ago with pgp and similar technologies, and anyone who hasn't realised that is living in the past.