As you may recall, shortly after the war on Terrorism began Ashcroft held a press conference to announce a major victory: he shut down a brothel in New Orleans.

Well, hot on the trail of more Terrorism™, Wired says Ashcroft is now going to crack down on … copyright violators!  Because, apparently, the criminals involved in copyright law have possible ties to terrorists.

But as is always the case, greater security means fewer freedoms — in this case, keeping bootleg Britney Spears Federline albums out of Osama Bin Laden’s hands means no more MP3 players, DVD burners,  or VCRs for you. Ashcroft supports the Induce Act which would make it illegal to sell items that encourage piracy, and he is opposed to the Boucher Bill which explicitly protects the rights of consumers to circumvent copy protection for the purposes of fair use.

So if Ashcroft (and the RIAA and the MPAA) gets his way, you may have a theoretical legal right to copy your CD to your MP3 player, but it may be illegal for you to find a way to do it (thanks to the DMCA and copy-protection on CDs) and it will probably be illegal for Apple to make and sell you an iPod anyway.

But, you know. It’s all for a good cause. Putting money in the RIAAs checking account Keeping weapons of mass destruction program related bootleg CDs out of terrorist hands.