In late October, someone at the U.S. House of Representatives decided to catch up on the latest season of Dexter, illegally downloading an episode of the TV series while at a congressional office. In the days that followed, with Hurricane Sandy threatening to keep federal workers hunkered down at home, employees of Congress downloaded the 2012 mob film Lawless, a Halloween-themed episode of The Middle, and an episode from Season 9 of CSI: New York.
Over the last four months, employees of the House of Representatives have illegally downloaded dozens of films and TV shows, according to a report shared with Whispers by ScanEye, a website that tracks what IP addresses have downloaded on BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a protocol for sharing large files over the Internet. Unauthorized downloads of copyrighted material is illegal in the U.S.
Whispers was able to ascertain a number of IP addresses associated with Congress using the IP geo-location website MaxMind. The report does not include IP addresses associated with every congressional office, so the number of illegal downloads may be higher.
"Gentle in what you do, Firm in how you do it"
- Buck Brannaman
For young men and women with ambitions toward a career in politics, working in a Congressional office can be a heady, almost dreamlike experience. Left unsupervised, the combination of youth indiscretion and close proximity to the nation’s levers of power produces results that can be ugly, messy and embarrassing for senior staff and even the representatives voters send to the Capitol to do the people’s work.
Over several months, according to online messages allegedly made by staffers with Democratic Congressman Rick Larsen, the D.C. office of Washington State’s 2nd District has been the setting of a staffers-gone-wild bash, a binge of embarrassing behavior including insults lobbed by legislative aides at the Congressman himself and accounts of on-the-job drinking, all broadcast for the world to see on via Twitter.
No, what really burns my ass is that as they were going at it like enemies, they all came together to vote themselves pay raises and Obamanixon signed off on it.
I about got a hard on watching the Richard Harris, Alec Guiness version of "Cromwell" where Oliver tells the Parliment what a bunch of bloated fucking whores they were and then his tropps come in an arrest them all and thinking I'd like to see our Charles beheaded and our Paliment told "You sirs are no Parliment!" (or Funkidellic) and taken off to get their just rewards for fucking the spirit and laws of the "Revolution" at the people's expense.
"God forbid we tell the savages to go fuck themselves." Batboy
