Really? So there's Homeland Security going after copyright infringement, now FBI. What's next? CIA? I've seen that in Europe they are already starting to use the Interpol for such things.

When did copyright infringement become one of the biggest crimes one could do? It certainly seems to be on the Government's top priority list, not far below terrorism.

Homeland Security doesn't "go after" copyright infringement.

DHS is a cobbled-together afterthought, the bureaucratic equivalent of Mr. Oogey-Boogey from Nightmare Before Christmas, a writhing collection of squiggley little agencies held together with stitched up burlap, created as a slapdash response to 9/11.

One of those agencies is ICE, the (small) organization originally chartered with transcontinental IP enforcement.

The part of our government that is supposed to enforce organized criminal infringement of IP is enforcing infringement of IP. It seems silly to get upset that they're doing so under the banner of "DHS". You'd rather it was DOJ? They'd be doing more than seizing domains.

It became the biggest crime because copyright control means control of what people can see, hear and talk about. There's a lot of money to be made in censorship and controlled conversations with consumers.

Because its easy to track and prosecute...

hacker breakins, difficult to track and prosecute hence FBI pretending to do there jobs by taking the low hanging fruit..

Not to mention, it's typically corporations with big pockets pushing for these sorts of investigations.

Can't edit parent post now, but here's an article with links to other articles about FBI priorities:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100809/17262010563.shtml

Identity theft and missing persons don't pay the bills, I guess.

You would think that a politician would see that as a prime way to get votes. "The FBI cares more about you downloading a song off the internet then about your child being abducted. We need to get their priority straight. Vote for XYZ 2012"

Have you considered a political career?

The unfortunate truth of politics is that anybody that's qualified for the position doesn't want it.

And anyone who wants to be in power is usually the type of person you least want near it.

I don't think it's your intellectual property that they care about...

Child porn is another biggie.

When I spoke with state/fed computer forensics types once they said it was ~50% of their workload.

Why? That's absurd.

Not at all. Going after child porn is both popular and safe.

The feds like to go after (some) copyright infringement because politically connected industries want that.

The ideal crime, from the feds' perspective, is one that combines all three characteristics.

One guy I talked to said occasionally they might have an attorney wanting them to do some time-consuming, heroic forensics on, say, a CD duplicator to find out how many copies of something were made. His response was something like "This guy's got pictures of a little boy getting sodomized here we're not going to drop this to work on that." Apparently there are a lot of people trading that child porn.

These forensics guys seemed to know what they're doing and had a good perspective on their priorities.

In reality, the FBI spends more resources on anti-terrorism (per incident) than anything else.

That's not hard to do if you start classifying everything as terrorism.

It's probably the easiest way for agents to shore up their numbers for promotion.