Interesting Salon piece compares the war on terrorism with the war on P2P file sharing.
When the MPAA tried to suppress the distribution of DeCSS, it quickly discovered that many of the individual users posting the code to the Web were prohibitively difficult to identify, ruling out direct legal action against them. The MPAA instead targeted their ISPs: legally, the Web hosting companies were obligated to take down DeCSS pages, unless the users were willing to stand up in court and be sued. Through this sidestep, the MPAA was able to sic its lawyers on the people it really wanted to sue, or failing that, make the problem go away.
In declaring that the U.S. government would not distinguish between terrorists and regimes that harbor terrorists, President Bush acted on the same principle. Like the ISPs, the Taliban would prefer to be a bystander in any conflict. By making them liable for the safe harbors they grant, though, Bush transferred some of the weight of U.S. pressure to a more identifiable target — in order to acquire greater leverage against his real enemies.
