In an appearance in Los Angeles to showcase a new federal antipiracy effort, John Ashcroft somehow managed to link the issue to the terrorist threat. As my Spinsanity co-editor Ben Fritz reported in Variety (his day job):

The attorney general even drew on the scariest of associations, warning that due to the lucrative nature of the crime, intellectual property theft “risks becoming a potential source of financing for terrorists,” although he cited no examples of a connection.

Now it’s certainly possible that terrorists could engage in intellectual property theft to finance their operations. But in the absence of evidence to support that claim, this looks more like Ashcroft invoking the terrorist threat for political leverage — behavior that is not acceptable from anyone, let alone the Attorney General of the United States. At this rate, we’re going to hear any day now that we need to block John Kerry’s health care plan so that the terrorists can’t get government-subsidized health insurance…