Film Piracy, Organized Crime and Terrorism 198
flip-flop writes "The RAND Corporation has just released a lengthy report titled "Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism" which attempts to link all three. The authors suggest that organized crime might be financing itself in part through movie piracy (PDF) — and in three out of 14 of their international case studies, they claim that profits from piracy end up with suspected terrorist organizations. But now for the interesting part! Quote from the preface: 'The study was made possible by a grant from the Motion Picture Association (MPA).' Ah, what a surprise..."
The RAND Corporation has made a video summary of the report as well. TorrentFreak has an article disputing some of the report's claims, focusing criticism on RAND's interchangeable use of the terms "piracy" and "counterfeiting" — the report deals with the physical distribution of DVDs, making only brief mention of digital downloads. The MPAA and others have barked up this tree before.
Re:me thinks that RAND don't protest too much. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah - these days we have the 'terrorist ghost', earlier we had the 'communist ghost'.
I wonder what's next.
The worst thing is that the gullible public falls for it. Especially those that aren't up to date with all details - like members of various courts.
It is of course possible that there are terrorist factions that makes money from counterfeiting and duplication of music&movies, but considering that counterfeit products often are cheap and sometimes have bad quality it must be a minor source of income when all production costs are paid. And download from torrents must be a very thin source of income.
It must be a lot easier to make money from cocaine and other drugs since they have a much higher price when they are offered to the consumer. Weapons are also more interesting to trade in for terrorists. Transfer of a load of AK47:s and other items to an African country can provide a decent profit. Think Somalia & pirates and where they did get their weapons.
Extortion and various types of scams are also good income sources. Check out Hells Angels, Bandidos and other organized crime gangs. Just be aware that those gangs are the soldiers on the field, connect the traces and you can end up in surprising places.
The RAND Corporation (Score:4, Interesting)
RAND was set up in 1946 by the United States Army Air Forces as Project RAND, under contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company, and in May 1946 they released the Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship. In May 1948, Project RAND was separated from Douglas and became an independent non-profit organization. Initial capital for the split came from the Ford Foundation.
According to the 2005 annual report, "about one-half of RAND's research involves national security issues."
Many of the events in which RAND plays a part are based on assumptions which are hard to verify because of the lack of detail on RAND's highly classified work for defense and intelligence agencies.
The RAND Corporation has been criticized as militarist. Due to the nature of its work, the RAND corporation also frequently plays a role in conspiracy theories.
In April 1970, a Newhouse News Service story reported that Richard Nixon had commissioned RAND to study the feasibility of canceling the 1972 election.
RAND has approximately 1,600 employees and five principal locations.
Seems like a fine objective non-profit think tank to me, helping to improve policy and decision making through objective research and analysis.
It doesn't have to make money (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:me thinks that RAND don't protest too much. (Score:5, Interesting)
Al Qaeda is known to have substantial capital
Reading this [amazon.com] I rather got the impression that they were strapped for cash most of the time, and what they had they had got through legal dealings with the US of other Bin Laden family parts.
So would Afghan opium, which the Taliban has extensively invested in.
Blatant misrepresentation. By 2000 the Taliban had banned opium production and by 2001,
. -- http://opioids.com/afghanistan/index.html [opioids.com]
One wonders how important that was for the US to start the war in Afghanistan, considering that a lack of Afghan opium would be a severe problem for the so-called "War on Drugs" in the US, a war that the government wages against its own citizens.
I said in a private offline conversation (so I unfortunately cannot provide a link) at Christmas 2001 that I expected the Afghan opium production to be back at the world's number 1 within five years, and lo and behold,
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium [wikipedia.org] (follow the references)
-- http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/2005_Afghan_opium_harvest_begins [wikinews.org]
Re:will you p (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest takeaway I get from this report is that you can never be certain physical media isn't counterfeit, so the only way to make certain you aren't financing criminals is to get all your music and video via P2P. But then, I'm only about the 100th person on here to say that. The MPAA fails to distinguish between unauthorized distribution of free copies and sales of counterfeit media in it's propaganda, referring to both by the inaccurate pejorative "piracy". Even if the study is valid, the MPAA's use of it to back up their misleading claims is highly suspect.
Re:speaking of interchangeble terms (Score:2, Interesting)
Hrrrm, organized crime and terrorists want to have p2p stopped and the MPAA wants p2p stopped; thus the MPAA must be either a terrorist organization or organized crime or both.
Re:me thinks that RAND doth protest too much. (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed - by this reasoning, the Government should be promoting, and certainly not opposing, free downloading, as part of its War On Terrorrr. Surely, the threat of terrorism is far more serious than any alleged loss of a few sales? "If it saves just one life" etc :)
Moreover, the government should immediately stamp out all movie production. This RAND study has clearly proven that movies are merely fodder for the illicit money-making activities of terrorists and organized crime.
Hahahahaha!! But seriously... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is so damn ridiculous that I couldn't help but laugh. How the hell can organized crime or terrorists make money out of free downloads?
But then again, as I considered it, they could make money out of bootlegs from the stuff they downloaded from torrents. There are mass disk burning operations where I come from, and since bandwidth isn't as cheap here (the highest bandwidth for residential accounts is, IIRC, 2Mbps) as it is in the US, people come to "bootleg bazaars" in droves to buy 16 movies-in-one DVD9s for PhP50 (~US$1).
This could indeed fund organized crime. It is certainly a possibility, as there is a market for bootlegs even though movies and other such content is freely available online. I myself bought more than 150 disks since DVDs went mainstream here (about 8 years ago) and I was still on dial-up, and almost everyone I know did the same.
Banning file-sharing won't actually do anything to stop this though, maybe if the damn movie/music industry would price their stuff more reasonably rather than spiking the price of every crappy new release, none of this would happen.
Right now, I blame RIAA/MPAA. If anyone's funding organized crime and terrorists, it's them.
Re:Re^2:Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse at work (Score:3, Interesting)
And yet, bootleg DVDs are everywhere. Probably because most of them originate from China where you're far more likely to be punished for littering than for bootlegging hollywood movies. In such an operation, the fact that you're shipping a ophysical product is a plus since it explains where all that cash is coming from. It looks legitimate so long as law enforcement doesn't actually inspect the product you ship too closely. Meanwhile, inspecting things carefully involves actual work and illegal drugs are much easier to inspect and are a much higher profile bust...
Put another way, find a kilo of illegal drugs and it makes the news. You get a good entry in your file. Keep it up and your promotion is on the fast track. Find a few crates of bootlegged "Lion King" and your superiors say "good work" while yawning.
So you get a profit margin of 500-800 percent, police don't really care, no three strikes laws for peddling bootleg DVDs, all of your production looks legitimate on the surface, etc.
That veneer of legitimacy makes for a lot more plausible deniability.
Re:aXXo, FXG, FXM... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:me thinks that RAND don't protest too much. (Score:2, Interesting)
Outstanding comments by both Knuckles and Z00L00K.
One must always look at the backgrounds of the "fellows" at RAND (and every other "stink tank") prior to reading their "studies"....
Whenever a BUSH invades a country, the drug trade increases substantially (note falling cocaine processing production in Panama - under their, then present, and previous presidents - then Bush Senior invades and once again it sky rockets upwards).
Just as with the present US Secretary of the Treasury, Geithner, it pays to research his background: previous employee of Kissinger and Associates, memberships in the Group of Thirty, Council of Foreign Relations, and Bank of International Settlements.
The Turkish intelligence report on al Qaeda posited it as an ongoing intel operation, with some of its operatives working for Pakistani intelligence, some for British intelligence, some for American intelligence, etc.
Blah blah Blah blah (Score:5, Interesting)
The geek in full flight.
For a look at the full spectrum of RAND research: Browse by Category [rand.org]
Free downloads - PDF or HTML.
Here is the briefest of samplings from the RAND Classics: [rand.org]
Williams "The Compleat Strategyst: Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strategy" 1954
Dresher "Games of Strategy: Theory and Applications" 1961
Dole and Asimov "Planets For Man"
Baran, ed. "On Distributed Communications" 1961-62
"A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates" 2001
Shapiro and Anderson "Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail"
I'll save everyone time and give you the link:
Kahn "The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence" [rand.org] 1960