Congressional Piracy?

While Congress has made repeated efforts to crack down on Americans who illegally download media, they’ve had less success controlling downloads taking place in the offices of Congress, as Joe Mullin reports in Ars Technica:

A post today in US News & World Report’s tech blog published new information from anti-piracy forensics company ScanEye, a company that offers BitTorrent monitoring services in the name of fighting piracy. The ScanEye report [PDF] shows apparently pirated movie files being downloaded via IP addresses associated with the US House of Representatives.

Congressional employees downloaded episodes of Glee, CSI, Dexter, and Home and Away in October and early November. There are more TV episodes downloaded than movies, but the report also shows downloads of films, such as Iron Sky, which was downloaded by a Congress-owned computer on Oct. 4; Life of Pi, downloaded on Oct. 27; and the Dark Knight Rises, downloaded on Oct. 25. Another download listed is Bad Santa 2, a movie which has not been released yet.