Browsing Posts tagged government
The White House came out earlier this week stating that it opposes CISPA. Hundreds of thousands of citizens have called and written to Congress, urging their representatives to oppose CISPA. Yet, despite all this effort, the House passed the bill 248-168.
“CISPA goes too far for little reason,” said Michelle Richardson, ACLU legislative counsel, in a statement on Thursday. “Cybersecurity does not have to mean abdication of Americans’ online privacy. As we’ve seen repeatedly, once the government gets expansive national security authorities, there’s no going back. We encourage the Senate to let this horrible bill fade into obscurity.”
There is still time to fight against CISPA as it will now move to the Senate. It will have a tougher time there as growing opposition to CISPA becomes more vocal.
The legislation has drawn the ire of legislators, civil liberties groups, security practitioners and professors, and hundreds of thousands of petitioners, who say the bill tramples over users’ privacy rights as it allows Web firms like Google and Facebook to give private users’ information to government agencies irrespective of other laws that protect users’ privacy. “It’s basically a privacy nightmare,” says Trevor Timm, a lawyer and activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “CISPA would allow companies to hand over private data to the government without a warrant, without anonymity, with no judicial review.”
But even before it passed, the House voted to amend the bill to actually allow even more types of private sector information to be shared with government agencies, not merely in matters of cybersecurity or national security, but in the investigation of vaguely defined cybersecurity “crimes,” “protection of individuals the danger of death or serious bodily harm,” and cases where that involve the protection of minors from exploitation.
That statute, which in effect widened the most controversial portion of the bill just hours before it came to a vote, is sure to draw even more controversy as the bill works its way through the legislative branch and reaches President Obama’s desk. President Obama currently backs a bill in the Senate put forward by Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, designed to increase the cybersecurity regulatory powers of the Department of Homeland security, which has been opposed by the GOP and stalled in the Senate.
You can read more about how CISPA affects you and find out if your representative voted for it. There are also 800+ companies currently supporting CISPA.
Calling your representatives is always best as they take phone calls and written letters far more serious than online form letters or online petitions.
You can get all the information you need in one handy post with these links.
On the Friday, April 6 edition of the Alex Jones Show, Alex talks with cryptographer, computer security specialist, and author Bruce Schneier. Mr. Schneier is a vocal critic of “security measures” used by the Transportation Security Administration. He was invited to testify before Congress about TSA abuses but was “formally uninvited” after the TSA complained. He is the author of numerous books, including Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive, Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, and Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.
Yes, Alex Jones falls more into the conspiracy theorist category, but Bruce Schneier was on the show. Watch it and make your own decision as to how informative it is.
