The heck with due process, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), powerful head of the Senate Judiciary Committee has come out in favor of destroying the computers of people who swap files on the internet.

I'd love to say that this AP article (from Yahoo!) was taken out of context, but the quote was in a US Senate hearing.

During the testimony, a representative from MediaDefender, Inc. stated "No one is interested in destroying anyone's computer," at which point Senator Hatch interrupted, saying "I'm interested." Later he added "If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that. If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions.

OK, this guy has completely lost it. I cannot believe that such a high-ranking member of government would be in favor of the deprivation of property by another citizen without due process. I was pretty sure that the Constitution protects against the government making laws that allow this. I'm even pretty certain that most of the laws in the US are based on the ideas that personal property is personal and that the user shouldn't be deprived of same. Clearly, I've misinterpreted the document that our forefathers wrote to protect us from this type of ridiculous intrusion.

This kind of support for DRM and other ridiculous technologies has got to stop!