By now, you’ve probably heard about Orrin Hatch suggesting that copyright holders have the ability and legal right to destroy your computer remotely should their material be found in your possesion without your legal ownership of said material. In other words, Metallica will blow up your new iBook when they find St. Anger stinking up your harddrive.

Surely, you would delete that Metallica, because, frankly, it sucks. Old Hatch even suggests that copyright holders would get an exemption from the anti-hacking law so that they could go about cyber-bombing your home. The whole idea of someone destroying your property because of you breaking a law is something that has precedent.

Early on in the “War on Drugs,” prosecutors and DEA agents realized that it’s not all that terrible for someone to make hundreds of millions of dollars, spend 3 years in jail, get out and live like a king for the rest of his life. No matter where you stand on the fight against drugs, you have to admit that the above method is fairly ineffectual.

To combat this problem, the government decided that they could take anything belonging to the convicted drug dealer under the guise that it was bought with money made from the sale of illegal substances. That’s OK I guess, but what if it was something that person owned before selling drugs. This little hiccup didn’t slow down the DEA.

I suspect problems like this would plague Hatch’s idea even more so. If my friend emails me an mp3 as an attachment, and I delete the email, that mp3 is still on my machine, in the cache of my mail client. Suppose Lars and the boys see their shitty music on my machine and zap my entire harddrive into molten goop. Now, I have been found guilty of and punished for a crime that I did not knowingly commit.

Now, not only have my privacy rights been abridged, my property rights have been abridged, and all my rights of the judicial system have been abridged. In truth, I have been treated as some sort of serf in a kingdom of overbearing beauracracy. Like little more than a Russian peasant on the Zhivago farm, I have been subjected to the whims of a brutish mob given sanction by the state.

Hatch then has shown us his hand. The monkey on his back is corporate greed. When thoughts like this even exist within his brain as not only plausible but practical, the people of Utah and the US need to realize whose interests are being protected. He has no more concern for the people of his state and their property than he does for the Constitution. Maybe someone should remotely destroy the old bastard’s pacemaker.

I fear he is simply indicative of the greater ignorance of our country’s leaders when it comes to technology. We can’t expect 60-year-olds to understand the intricacies of modern computing, but we also shouldn’t be beholden to their ham-handed attempts at legislating its use. The time for new blood in our nations halls of democracy has come. We need some younger, more technology-literate leaders and we need them