On a more mundane note, copyright law is supposed to be a balanced bargain between society and the rights holder: in exchange for obtaining a limited monopoly protecting the work, the rights holder grants society certain rights (including “fair use”). By criminalizing the breaking of digital locks even when the intended usage would otherwise be lawful, they are basically negating all such provisions in the law and the monopoly becomes absolute. This, I think, is just plain wrong.

First, about the war – Saddam certain had WMDs in the past. We know that because he used them, both against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, and against his own population. Saddam was also quite openly supporting and sponsoring Palestinian terrorists (he held frequent press conferences about this, where he gave $25k payments to the families of suicide bombers) and allowed at least one senior AQ guy to receive medical treatment in Iraq. AQ then went on to demonstrate a sophisticated capability to attack the US homeland. When you combine all of that with the fact that EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. of the world’s major foreign intelligence agencies was saying that Saddam STILL had WMDs, that adds up to an intolerable threat – Iraqi WMDs delivered to the USA by terrorists. It doesn’t matter who was in the White House, or what party he was from. The moment the second plane hit the World Trade Center, Saddam was a dead man.

Second, about those WMDs – The entire WMD arsenal of any nation other than the three superpowers would fit comfortably into a three bedroom townhouse. Thanks to the miracle of GPS, it is possible to locate any point on earth to an accuracy of better than the width of a shovel blade. Now it may be that all of Iraq’s WMDs were destroyed back in 1991 in the first Gulf War. It may be, too, that Saddam decided that it was more important to buy another solid gold toilet for his palace than to rebuild his WMD capability afterwards. But … with a year and a half of advance warning, and all of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon available to him, do really believe that he couldn’t have hidden his WMDs well enough that they wouldn’t be found? We’ll probably never know for sure.