The recording industry is watching you. Or so the most recent media reports would have you believe. As the Napster wars keep escalating, the recording industry is redoubling its efforts in the hunt for new and improved ways to keep its music out of your shared databases. The newest tactic is surveillance. Increasingly, the recording industry is watching individual users on any given peer-to-peer (P2P) network, using programs like Copyright Agent and Media Tracker to discern who is downloading what and when.

You always knew that it was possible to peek into the hard drive of another user on a peer-to-peer network; that's what P2P is all about, right? Using Napster's "Hotlist" feature, for example, you yourself might even track daily changes in your favorite users' collections. And of course, you always knew that your username was attached to an IP address, and an IP address was attached to an ISP, and that it was possible that someone could figure out who you were and what you were downloading. Maybe you were even one of the lucky few who were blocked from Napster because you had a Metallica song in your collection: You were a pioneer in discovering that file trading isn't quite as inconspicuous as most people once imagined.

But P2P networks always seemed anonymous. There were, after all, millions of users on them; what were the odds that anyone was personally watching you?

Perhaps you shouldn't have bet against those odds, because these days the record industry is trying to watch you. But that doesn't mean that it's time for you to log off in fear of Big Brother. P2P industry veterans believe the surveillance campaign is more of a scare tactic than an effective tool; and despite the recording industry's attempts to watch you, they are sure it won't make a difference to P2P in the long run. As Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, puts it, "Is the RIAA and its friends doing some kind of technology surveillance? Yes. Is it going to work? No. It's really dumb. It's another serious mistake by an industry going out of business in the stupidest way, bumping its head on the steps on the way down, because the record industry was always a bunch of thugs and that's what they still are."

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