It’s actually understandable that people are by now a bit confused as to which specific method of mass surveillance is being debated. Or who will carry it out.

The “adversary” when it comes to filesharing can be quite clearly defines as a very narrow range of interests – ones who spend more lobbying money in congress than most other tech companies have ever found necessary.

Which is why tunneling is the bread and butter for filesharing. That, or onion routing protocols. Given that the attacker is a peer in the swarm you need to ensure that neither the query nor the file transfer can be certified as coming from the client whose ip you see on the host list.

HADOPI in France passed with nary a hitch, for instance. The response by the french citizenry was predictable. Filesharing rose 3% immediately as many ordinary french citizens sought out pirates in order to learn how to fileshare just to spite their government.

“The RIAA’s current partner DtecNet also has shortcomings as they fail to understand how BitTorrent works.”

…tells me most about anything. A big bunch of scammers with little knowledge of law and even less in technology? And they’ll mass-mail out to dead people, pets, people who don’t own a computer…and possibly the odd filesharer. Demanding protection money or an expensive lawsuit over the flimsiest premise they think they can get away with.

As long as there is no law on the books severely penalizing false claims, the “mass-mail extortion model” will continue.