I'm no fan of our former Minister for Justice (given that I felt he was far too right-wing), but I can't help but feel that he's been somewhat misrepresented by the Irish Times in this article which claims he's in favour of a legal obligation to report crimes. If that was indeed what he said, it wouldn't surprise me, and it's the tricky sort of thing I haven't liked him for in the past, where on the face of it it looks harmless enough, but digging deeper it's veering off into over-policing. However, reading further down the article it appears that he's actually referring to someone who is already being questioned with respect to a serious crime, i.e. a witness or a suspect, which puts a slightly different tilt on his argument - I'm still not wholly comfortable with it, but it's hardly a KGB-style "kids! tell us your parents are capitalist running dogs!" as implied by the opening paragraph.

Because only terrorists drug-dealers would use pre-paid mobile phones.

In other scaremongering news, I heard a lawyer for one or more fashion labels this morning saying that the money payed for knock-off watches, clothes, suitcases, etc. "could end up, I'm afraid to say, being used to fund terrorism". Gah. When I am king, that word and all its variants will be banned from use in news stories, press conferences, and anything even remotely related to public discourse until such time as I see fit. Besides, it's a bad movie.

London Bomber visited Pakistan... or did he? This is, I guess, a sort of counterargument to your recent post regarding the taking of pictures at immigration points. Or, I dunno, a bad example, or something.

Somewhat bemused by this proposed California legislation that would require the likes of AOL to send out return envelopes with their CDs to facilitate recycling of the CDs. I mean, you want them to put more packaging out there?

1. make out that filesharing is killing your business. demand legislation.
2. acknowledge (maybe) that filesharing per se is ok, but sharing copyrighted material is killing your business. demand legislation forcing filesharing networks to be liable for copyright.
3. show off some audio fingerprinting software to the lawmakers
4. if you haven't already done so, buy the fingerprinting company
5. when your new legislation kicks in, charge a massive license fee to anyone who wants to use the fingerprinting, and sue anyone who doesn't into oblivion with your new legislation

I'm tellin' ya, not buying music from the RIAA is the only way forward.

You know, if costing the movie industry squillions of dollars is such a "serious crime", why not arrest people like Kevin Costner for crimes such as Waterworld?

NASA aren't just going back to the moon, and visiting Mars; they're also checking if you're a terrorist.

PR vs. Reality. No word on what Dr. Dre, U2 guitar player The Edge, Alicia Keys, or Toby Keith (who?) have to offer on the topic, but it should be noted that Dre is 50 cent's producer.

According to David Usher's management, any artist who signs with EMI is forced into having their material produced in a copy-protected format world wide. Ew.

We don't have a DMCA just yet.

Actually, that's a lie. Irish copyright law is currently harsher than the DMCA - or at least, that's my recollection from the last time I went digging.