CISPA: Because The House of Representatives Still Doesn't Understand The Internet

Romanian My Escutcheon

Remember SOPA? Little bill, threatened invasive government action against Internet content providers, would have done very little to curb online privacy, died alone and unloved after millions of Internet users told the government to shove it up their asses?

Turns out it had a little brother.

Wikipedia wrote:

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is a United States proposed law introduced on November 30, 2011 by U.S. Representative Michael Rogers (R-MI) and 111 co-sponsors. The bill would allow the voluntary sharing of attack and threat information between the U.S. government and security cleared technology and manufacturing companies to ensure the security of networks against patterns of attack.

CISPA has been criticized by advocates of Internet privacy and neutrality because they feel it contains too few limits on how and when the government may monitor private information when it might become collaterally entangled in the process of passing threat information, and too few safeguards with respect to how the data may be used; they fear that such new powers may be used to find and punish file sharers and copyright infringers rather than the stated foreign spies or hackers.

CISPA went before the House today, and passed 248 -168, despite promises from the White House that the bill would be vetoed if it managed to get past the Senate.

Fortunately that's just short of the 2/3 vote that would be necessary to get past a veto, but the fact that it's gotten this far is... less than encouraging.

So, let's talk about how a couple hundred government officials still haven't figured out that people aren't okay with invasive legislature which would have a demonstrable effect on their Internet use.

Muse Among Men

to see how your congressman voted click here

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3523/votes?page=1

Jars

my congressman is a fucking idiot so he probably voted for it

series of tubes and all that

yup tom reed: aye

Skeith

I live in Hawaii, and there was a state bill proposed that made SOPA look like a "do not litter" sign. Kinda surprised that Hirono abstained this time-- not at all surprised that Hanabusa voted for it.

Lockout

missed this thread earlier, but yeah, fuck this shit

Did CISPA Actually Get Better Before Passing? Not Really (techdirt)

Basically, the amendment closes a loophole but opens a door. It takes away some of the language that allows overreach of the bill, but then explicitly endorses the exact things people were worried the government would do with that language—as in, start using the data to investigate and build cases against American citizens without regard for the laws that would normally protect their privacy.

Is that an improvement? CISPA would now grant the government less vague power, which is good, but would also grant it brand new specific powers, which is bad and frankly pretty insulting. Because, if this is indeed an improvement and a narrowing of the government's power, how are we to take that if not as a confession that virtually every representative has been baldly lying this whole time? They have said over and over again that they don't want or plan to use the bill for anything except shoring up network security, but we're supposed to see the addition of these brand new applications as limiting CISPA's target? To me, that sounds like they're saying: "Okay, you got us—we really wanted to secretly do all this other stuff. As long as you still let us do that, we'll change the bill."

So the way I see it, there are two ways to look at the Quayle amendment: either it made the bill worse, by massively expanding its stated purpose to whole new areas of the law such that it can no longer accurately be called a "cybersecurity" bill at all, or else it made the bill better by codifying the ways it can be abused for non-cybersecurity purposes.

Of course, it's not as though everyone trusted what supporters were saying about the bill's purpose before. We all knew it would be used for these other things. But simply getting them to admit that is not really progress. It's accurate to say that the amendment has limited the government's power under CISPA by changing the language, but it's also ludicrous to say that turning a cybersecurity/national-security bill into a cybersecurity/cybercrime/violent-crime/child-exploitation/national-security bill at the last minute represents narrowing or improving it. In fact, the only way that's an improvement is if the representatives are admitting that they were planning on it being used for even more unstated purposes all along, but are now content with choosing only a few of the things they have repeatedly denied they wanted. I see how that can be framed as progress, but it's not exactly something that the House deserves any praise for.

as soon as I move away from school and get settled in somewhere more permanent, I'm going to seriously consider running for some sort of local office. Congress gets more and more absurd everyday, and I'm pretty sure the only thing that'll fix it is more people getting involved in politics and working their way up. public outcry clearly isn't having an effect

Dongs Galore

The internet's just a passing fad anyway