Reason 1,543,292 that Alberto Gonzalez should not ever have been Attorney General in the first place

My friend Chuck writes:

Holy cow.
I'm a bright guy, into music and online geekery.
A news junkie. I pay attention to stuff.

How could this not be bigger news?
This was almost a month ago, and I just now found a link on the Steinski blog:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual-property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including "attempts" to commit piracy.

"To meet the global challenges of IP crime, our criminal laws must be kept updated," Gonzales said during a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington on Monday.

And yes, Chuck's right. THIS IS INSANE.

I wish I were making up the following passage (also from the above-listed article):

[the proposed law would . . .] Create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software. Anyone using counterfeit products who "recklessly causes or attempts to cause death" can be imprisoned for life. During a conference call, Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it.

OK, so 21st century I.P. justice could conceivably involve the imprisonment a volunteer nurse at a free clinic who, due to brute economic necessity, uses a bootleg copy of her legitimately purchased copy of Microsoft's OS (if that copy is involved in some sort of unstated hypothetical failure that leads to the hypothetical death of a hypothetical patient). My question is, given that all OSs crash from time to time, should we not also imprison the software engineers if their product is "involved" in the death of a patient? And let's observe that intellectual property pirates are not "attempting to cause death." They are attempting to cause sales. Who, in practical terms, would ever be deservingly prosecuted under this law? In short, who's doing this?

And let's not skip too lightly over the justice department's statement that: "It is a general tenet of the criminal law that those who attempt to commit a crime but do not complete it are as morally culpable as those who succeed in doing so." BUT, that doesn't mean they, too, should go to jail. Let's assume that I am in a foul mood and I fully intend to speed through residential streets tonight, threatening pedestrians, housepets, and a considerable number of squirrels. But when I reach my car, and prepare to rev the engine menacingly, I discover that I have a flat tire. I expend all of my suppressed rage fixing the tire, feel surprisingly good after having done so, and retire for the evening, resolving never to speed on residential streets again.

Am I morally culpable? Sure. To a degree. Definitely not to the same degree as an actual residential speeder, though. Is there a law that could or should ever be used to convict me of my nasty thoughtcrime? Nope. And that's smart public policy.

Gonzalez, true to form, wants to nose around in our households (minds?) weighing our intentions as we wrestle with the daily question of where to secure our next snippet of digital entertainment. This impulse, consistent with his general disrespect for settled notions of individual rights and liberties makes him a very, very, very bad attorney general.

But you knew that already.

Woo-Hoo!

Now THIS is more like it! There are still a few bugs nestled in nooks and crannies, but this is pretty much the new face of blogologie. I've taken some steps that make it easier for me to post, and also (presumably) for you to subscribe to a feed if you are one of the happy few who has dialed in here to see whether anything smart has crept from my synapses into the circuits. I've got a backlog of stuff I've wanted to rant about, but I'm surrendering to the exhaustion brought on by looking at code for hour after hour after hour after hour. I'll play with my shiny new toy later.

Aaaagh!

Retemplating the blog (or attempting to) at long last. Technical difficulties are not the fault of your receiver.