

FBI Employees Download Pirated Movies and TV Shows - fraqed
http://torrentfreak.com/fbi-employees-download-pirated-movies-and-tv-shows-130209/

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orofino
Of course they do. What exactly is the point of this? The organization is
against piracy (as are many many private individuals), but as they say an
organization is made of people...

Is the point to prove hypocrisy? As if we needed any further proof that people
and governments are hypocritical. It doesn't change anything and it doesn't
make downloading content any more legal or morally right. Seems like a waste
of time and attention.

Breaking news, some FBI employees also speed on the highway.

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lclarkmichalek
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque>

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Amadou
It may not invalidate the claim that piracy is wrong. But it certainly calls
into question their suitability to enforce anti-piracy laws.

As to orofino's claim that it doesn't make piracy any more morally right, I
disagree. It is one more piece of evidence that piracy is so widespread that
it is morally correct - when people in basically every organization in the
world break the law on a regular basis, it means the law itself needs to be
reevaluated.

To use his own example, the same can be said for speed limits which are
generally supposed to be set to the 85th percentile. If a speed limit is set
too low - as shown by more than 15 percent of drivers exceeding it - then the
limit itself needs to be corrected.

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lclarkmichalek
I wouldn't go so far as to say that something being widespread makes it
morally correct. Maybe it makes the law unworkable, but morals are generally a
personal choice.

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Amadou
Laws are fundamentally codifications of human nature. So a law that goes
against the majority of people's natural inclinations (or to use your term,
personal choices) is by definition immoral.

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shail
Does anyone feels that what we are trying to achieve in case of piracy
(stopping it) is probably the wrong way to handle it?

Obviously everyone is doing it even the people responsible for stopping it.
That looks more like natural evolution everyone's trying to stop.

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dsr_
The surprising thing is that they were doing this at work. Really, FBI?

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jzwinck
The surprising thing is that you're surprised. Less than three years ago we
learned that some well-paid members of the SEC were using substantial time and
resources at work to view, download, and store porn from the internet.
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/23/sec-porn-probe-
staf...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/23/sec-porn-probe-staffers-
w_n_548931.html) and I quote, "A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington
headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading
pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs
or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office."

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incision
I've witnessed situations like the attorney there and more.

Spending 8 hours a day browsing porn for weeks at a time. Printing 3x5 _foot_
pictures of the worst stuff you can imagine. Openly discussing all sorts of
incriminating stuff via email or SMS on company phones. Assuming that somebody
actually has to watch all the security cameras when they're actually streaming
x264 to a server with months of capacity.

It must be dangerously easy to think yourself invincible once you get away
with something a few times.

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Mahn
"With help from BitTorrent monitoring company ScanEye" <\- How does that work?
Do they simply collect IPs from peers and seed of each file and dump them all
into their own database? And they have a _business_ around it? That sounds
rather creepy. But I guess it's good to know there are people doing this at
least.

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jiggy2011
Yes, basically that. Companies have been doing this for _years_.

This is why many torrent clients have blocklists built in, though how helpful
they actually are is dubious.

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panacea
I hope they're downloading "Home and Away" with a view to prosecuting the
makers! (It's an absolutely dire Australian soap opera).

But more seriously, an Aussie expat (can they work for the FBI?) is probably
missing the show and, as in so many similar circumstances, has no legal method
for paying to watch so ends up torrenting.

(also, water is wet? who knew?)

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damncabbage
As an Aussie I can assure you that, like nobody drinks Fosters here, nobody
watches Home & Away either. ;)

