What Doctorow criticizes is a general problem, not a problem in general-purpose computation; we see the exact same fallacious thinking in the TSA. Terrorists at

What Doctorow criticizes is a general problem, not a problem in general-purpose computation; we see the exact same fallacious thinking in the TSA. Terrorists attack the United States with a hijacked aeroplane, so they ramp up security in airports - and mainly in the airports. The hijackers were passengers, so they focus their attention on the passengers, and the passengers only. The target was American buildings by means of hijacked aeroplanes, so they focus their attention on who and what goes on the plane - not what may happen in a crowded airport itself. A nutty attacker hides a bomb in his shoes, later his underwear, so we have to take off our shoes and get patted down or x-ray scanned respectively. These are people trying to catch the specific perpetrators of yesterday, as if they had a time machine and could go back and stop that individual, not people who are trying to get to the root of the problem and deal with it. When governments impose taxes on optical media, because they "help" people pirate music, they might as well tax shoes and underwear while they are at it. When external hard drives came into vogue, NAS's in particular, Western Digital blacklisted media extensions like .mp3, because that would facilitate piracy; whether the government, lobby groups or they themselves came up with this I don't know. In this digital web age, people have moved their attention from physical media to digital media online, and now "the internet" is the complicit perpetrator. The good and bad news is that this is a general error in people's line of thought, and it is a good thing that this is a problem that you don't have to be a geek to understand nor care about, because it will affect you whenever you travel, have a darker skin than most people, or use the internet. You can bury your head in the sand, but this will and does affect every person in the Western world you can imagine. Blame the media groups, blame the TSA, but most of all, recognize that we can't just focus our attention at the proverbial shoes and underwear, but have to grasp the scope of the root problem at the core of this, and how people soon enough will find something other to try to regulate and police to no effect and benefit for us all. Today it's the TSA and MPAA; tomorrow we will have to suffer a new organization of fools and another slew of politicians.