Check out
this article on Wired. It invovles a government raid on a file sharing organisation in the US. Now I don't want to get into a debate about whether or not file sharing is right. I know the arguments on both sides. The music/film industry say that file sharing is starving the business of much needed revenue which would be ploughed back into new talent. The file sharers say that whilst the industry employ profitering techniques, (like region encoding, meaning that to stay legal if you moved from the US to Europe you'd have to re-purshase your film collection), then the market will "correct" itself in this way. They also point out that it's hypocracy for the film industry to complain about copyright breaches when they well know that the reason that the industry is based on the west coast is that they moved out there so they could rip off early patents of cameras etc and be beyond the reach of the east coast law enforcers.
No, what interested me about the article was the few telling sentences and phrases that it contained, phrases like
Acting on detailed information provided by the motion picture industry...
let you know exactly who's pulling the government strings. But the most interesting phrase is
ICE, the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security...
Excuse me! Homeland Security? You're kidding right? Good to know all the tax dollars spent in the name of anti-terrorism and some of the draconian anti-terror laws are being put to good effect isn't it?