When bad policy attacks

Brian Krebs at the Washington Post reports on some ill-advised proposed legislation:

The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee introduced legislation on Tuesday to prohibit the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software across all federal government computers and networks.

This is what happens when policymakers fail to separate problems from the technology that the problems are built upon. It’s roughly equivalent to observing that sports cars are involved in a lot of accidents and therefore banning sports cars from public roadways. Whenever possible, legislation should avoid even mentioning specific technologies, and instead should focus on the underlying problem (in this case, the inadvertent leaking of information by government employees/computers).