The Security Mentor

BBC journalist/producer Adam Livingstone tackles just that question in a recent BBC article about BitTorrent, file sharing, encryption and law enforcement. I talked about "media frenzy" in my recent column about MySpace: Livingstone says that's exactly what is happening, although being British he writes much better than I do.

He makes a devastating observation about how mainstream media cover the Internet:

Why is it that every time the media starts to talk about the internet they feel compelled to bang on about paedophiles and terrorists and generally come over like a cross between Joe McCarthy and the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?

Well here's one answer - it sells copy. Another answer is that we're totally scared of new media, because new media is railways and we're canals, and you all just know how that's going to end.

So we seek to equate the internet with all bad things to scare you off it.