LimeWire CEO responds to congressional inquiry

Thanks to the slow-moving United States legal process and the glut of copyright litigation, the names of P2P services often live on long after their actual services die in popularity. Limewire is one of those, thanks to the high profile cases it found itself wrapped up in.

One of those cases was a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing in 2007 that focused on security holes opened by LimeWire, and showed that over 200 classified government documents were available for download via the service. General Wesley Clark said, "It's just totally unacceptable. The American people would be outraged if they were aware of what's inadvertently shared by government agencies on P2P networks."

The Lime Group's Chairman Mark Gorton had to testify before the committee, explaining that a new interface for "neophyte users" was being developed to safeguard them against making private files available.

Last week, Representatives Darrell Issa (R - Calif.) and Edolphus Towns (D - N.Y.) took Gorton to task yet again, this time over recent security breaches allegedly related to P2P software. The two Congressmen sent a letter to Gorton expressing "deep concern regarding the apparent continued privacy and security risks associated with the use of LimeWire."

Gorton today outlined the software's upgrades in a letter to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, "LimeWire 5, released last December, by default does not share documents even if a user purposely attempts to do so. It even un-shares documents that a user may have shared using an earlier version of LimeWire."

By default, he says, LimeWire will share nothing, and nothing a user does will make anything available unless the software is expressly told to do so. "In short, there is absolutely no way to access a LimeWire 5 user's documents unless that user affirmatively elects to make them available," Gorton's letter noted.