Does the FBI Care More About Copyright Issues than Missing Persons?

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI for short, formed in 1908 with the goal to investigate crime and ultimately, serve justice. Over the years, it’s helped put many people behind bars, and as an avid watcher of America’s Most Wanted, I have seen many times how the FBI has helped, with both finding missing persons and also putting the worst of the worst kind of people behind bars.

As a United States Government agency, the FBI’s primary goal is to ultimately help the people, by protecting the country from things like terrorist attacks, drug trafficking, cyber attacks, public corruption and so forth, along with helping to locate missing persons and the people responsible. Today, though, does something like that still top the FBI’s priority list?

Recently, the agency has majorly amped up its concern with copyright issues, and according to a recent report, has been putting less of a focus on missing persons. And as if processing things like DNA and information doesn’t already take long enough, under the slightly revamped structure, the backlog will continually take about 2 years to process.

At the same time, the agency is now putting in a stronger effort to combat copyright issues, which to me, seems like something that should be far less of a priority. I’m not an expert on the FBI or its goals, far from it, but how on earth does something like copyright come above the interests of the country’s citizens? Yes, naive thinking, I know.

How does one associate “Fidelity”, “Bravery” and “Integrity” to copyright?!

“The FBI Laboratory’s low prioritization of these cases (.pdf) can have a broader effect because many missing persons are victims of homicide,” the report said. “Therefore, even if a perpetrator is not identified, DNA profiles from crime scenes could be uploaded and potentially linked to each other in CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), thereby aiding homicide investigations and potentially leading to the identification of a suspect.”