Congress Comes To Realization That People Out There Are Still Using Limewire

Representative Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, is peeved at LimeWire, several years after the P2P program first found itself in the crosshairs of record companies for illegal file sharing. But it seems that Waxman is now more concerned with the possible identity-theft repercussions of folks sharing music and movies than the file-swapping itself:

“We used the most popular P2P program, LimeWire, and ran a series of basic searches,” Waxman said in his hearing statement. “What we found was astonishing: personal bank records and tax forms, attorney-client communications, the corporate strategies of Fortune 500 companies, confidential corporate accounting documents, internal documents from political campaigns, government emergency response plans and even military operation orders.”

The information Waxman and his investigators found is often “inadvertently shared” when using P2P services to illicitly download music, movies, and other copyrighted works.

In a sweet piece of lazy-ass buck-passing, LimeWire CEO Mark Gorton’s mea culpa sidestepped his software’s poor security controls, blaming the meddling kids who use his program for fiddling with it and telling Congress to handle the issue its own damn self:

The only institution in the United States with the power to mandate the creation of an effective enforcement mechanism to police the Internet is the United States Congress,” Gorton said.

Of course, my first thoughts upon reading all this were “Isn’t there a war going on?” And “Who is still dumb enough to use LimeWire and to leave their tax records in view of some kid downloading Chilli Peppers songs?”

Waxman Puts Squeeze On LimeWire [Hollywood Reporter]