CISPA: Act now

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act just passed in the House, during a vote that was moved up a day and staged during the NFL draft. It vastly expands the already onerous act into one that allows significant domestic surveillance.

As TechDirt notes:

Basically this means CISPA can no longer be called a cybersecurity bill at all. The government would be able to search information it collects under CISPA for the purposes of investigating American citizens with complete immunity from all privacy protections as long as they can claim someone committed a “cybersecurity crime”. Basically it says the 4th Amendment does not apply online, at all. Moreover, the government could do whatever it wants with the data as long as it can claim that someone was in danger of bodily harm, or that children were somehow threatened—again, notwithstanding absolutely any other law that would normally limit the government’s power.

This bill must be blocked in the Senate. If you’re a US citizen, you need to call your Senator now. This action list over on Reddit is fantastic, or, once again, Grassroutes makes this easy. Just click a button below:

(If you’re reading the feed, you probably won’t see the Grassroutes widget above. Click here to see the buttons, and to get the code to paste the widget on your own site.


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3 responses to “CISPA: Act now”

  1. Marcus Povey Avatar

    I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; if it’s possible, it will happen.

    There is a concerted world wide effort on at the moment to introduce and consolidate systems of control in order to protect the interests of certain corporate, financial and governmental powers. Free citizens talking freely changes the world, and that is a threat.

    Unfortunately this means this will keep on coming back, just like the UK’s IMP being resurrected as the CCDP, together with ID cards. It will keep happening until one of two things happens; we remove these powers from the game by routing around them and making them an irrelevance, or we make the systems of control technically impossible.

    For the internet this means encryption, distributed systems and technologies like onion routing being built in at the infrastructure layer, an alternative to centralised certificate authorities to secure HTTPS, and also some alternative to the ISP gateway model of access which is far too much of a tempting target for anyone who wants to tap traffic.

  2. Polymixin Avatar
    Polymixin

    if you try to tweet, it says that you support the act… so you may want to tweak before you tweet. 

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