New CISPA Cybersecurity Bill Even Worse Than SOPA 234
An anonymous reader writes "As congressmen in Washington consider how to handle the ongoing issue of cyberattacks, some legislators have lent their support to a new act that, if passed, would let the government pry into the personal correspondence of anyone of their choosing. This is SOPA being passed in smaller chunks... 'H.R. 3523, a piece of legislation dubbed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (or CISPA for short) has vague definitions that could allow Congress to circumvent existing exemptions to online privacy laws and essentially monitor, censor and stop any online communication that it considers disruptive to the government or private parties.'"
Cant stop a moving train (Score:5, Insightful)
You can only slow it down as this train is being driven by the federal government with virtually unlimited power, money, and time.. All this stuff ( and more ) will eventually pass and our digital freedom goes out the door.
Just a matter of time. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Only restrict, never grant. (Score:5, Insightful)
"This is SOPA being passed in smaller chunks."
So long as all law is made solely to restrict people and _never_to recagnize rights or prevent abuses such as this, it will just be attempt after attempt until a given law passes. It is absolutely inevitable.
Congress must enact law that supercedes any prior or later law indicating that personal communications CANNOT be intercepted with anything short of a court order. This, for the various things that are trying to be passed now. Only when they have to fight for the revokation of these protective laws before they can bribe their desired laws into affect will we be in any way safe.
But it'll never happen.
Re:Cant stop a moving train (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup, and even if they can't slip it past the public eye, all they need to do is attach it as a rider to the We Love America And The Troops And Kittens Act Of 2013 and it'll pass unanimously.
Conflicted (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cant stop a moving train (Score:5, Insightful)
agreed, its only a matter of 'which year' is the actual death of the free internet. free as in freedom; I don't give a rat's as about money matters, in this context.
pressure will not stop and sooner or later, we'll lose what we have become used to. we've had some good internet days during the last decade or two; but the government AND big business have teamed up to ruin it.
remember that. remember who really ruined things.
darknets will be the only thing left for truly freedom-based communications.
what a world we have created; or allowed to grow in this direction. so sad that 'money and power is all that matters'.
End of the cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
Laws like this are the defacto end of cloud computing if you have an obligation to protect your data.
Or rather.. and end to it in the USA.
Next up; crypto is for terrorists and child pornographers!
Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
I think we're on the edge of a change in how modern democracies work. They can't continue on their current form. They never really did a good job of representing the people anyway, it's just that since the proliferation of the internet, everyone is much more aware of this fact.
Re:Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
yup, the cat is out of the bag, I wonder how civilization will react when the government starts destroying free speech on the internet in their lame attempt at putting the cat back in the bag.
Re:Cant stop a moving train (Score:5, Insightful)
The way to fight legal snooping isn't to fight each and every snooping bill. Eventually one will pass. The way is to make a law saying the oppposite, a guarantee of privacy bill. Offense>defense.
Re:Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, information works both ways. If you know your citizens are on the eve of mass riots, you might get radical changes before any actual violence begins.
Re:how to stop this (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is it time for an amendment to the Constitution (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an amendment for that already, the fourth. The problem is that requiring constitutionality of legislation doesn't mean anything if the judiciary doesn't defend it, and when it comes to this the courts are totally fucking useless.
Re:Cant stop a moving train (Score:5, Insightful)
agreed, its only a matter of 'which year' is the actual death of the freedom
FTFY.
Freedom is not good for the 1%. They have gone by different names in the past of course. It is a cycle. The 1% grows through abuse after abuse, and gradual poolings of influence and resources.
Eventually they will push it too far and either 1) vastly lower their own standards of living by taking out society with it, at which time they tend to migrate somewhere else (like a virus) or 2) society rears up and kills the fuckers.
Either way, we all end up bloody, a lot of drama, and then come the speeches about how we are going to create a new society in which the past will not repeat itself.
Animal Farm is not a book. It is simple observation of repeating patterns.
Re:Cant stop a moving train (Score:5, Insightful)
Once they have the electronic prescedent they will consider physical mail and media ways to circumvent the 'legitimate' surveillance of the information interchange system. Expect to get it opened.
It's painful that we'll get the slide into totalitarianism in our lifetime. Perhaps it's time to stop fighting it and join up; if we rush it along we can get through the party-with-paramilitary wing stage and grind the populace under the jackboots for a dozen years, then into the total war stage in a dozen years, get a collapse and revolution and then Never Again for another fifty years.
And hey, totalitarian imagery has it's charm.
Re:The price of freedom... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the down payment. The full price is much higher.
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.
Re:Cant stop a moving train (Score:5, Insightful)
remember that. remember who really ruined things.
- I always remember WHO really ruined the things - those who asked government for bread and circuses and told it that it could do anything as long as it delivered those things.
Re:Cant stop a moving train (Score:5, Insightful)
Surrender Monkeys (Score:5, Insightful)
Guys, let's stop thinking like Surrender Monkeys when it comes to SOPA and the government. Congressmen are just politicians and almost without exception very stupid people. They make knee-jerk decisions based on how many drinks lobbyists bought them at the bar the night before. But they are most definitely very susceptible to the prospect of pitchfork-waving crowds, eager to nail their hides to the barn door.
Look at what happened with the last SOPA showdown. The backlash was so severe and massive that Congress was practically pissing itself to run away from that bill. We, by their standards, melted their phone lines and crashed their Blackberries.
Last time we had Google and Wikipedia and other high-traffic sites leading the charge, but we can't count on them doing it again next time or to not make a deal with Hollywood/the RIAA.
We can create the perception of a groundswell preemptively. We can give them a taste of their own medicine preemptively, the very same medicine they would foist on us. If they want to subject us to crap like this, let's hijack their individual Blackberries and let them feel what it's like to have this done to them by anonymous strangers.
Honestly when I read sentiments like, "Oh well, the government is going to screw us no matter what we do so let's give up now," it reminds me of that scene from Swingers
For pete's sake, people, we're the people who run the central nervous system of the world. How is it that we psych ourselves out over stuff like this? We should be able to mold the government like putty. And it would help that every time we send them a message we put a common tagline like "Free America!" so that they understand it's a spontaneous expression from the electorate that they're fucking up and better straighten up and fly right.
At the risk of being hunted down... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure that our forefathers would say the exact same thing. Anyone who genuinely believes that this trainwreck of an idea is a good thing either needs to have their head examined or is being paid by a corporation and/or consortium. Fucking goddamn, this pisses me off.
IP is worthless (Score:4, Insightful)
All copyrights, patents, and trademarks are used for these days is for Big Business as weapons to skewer and brain-bash people they don't like, be it competition, criticism, or anyone else that doesn't subscribe to whatever dogma is mandated by the company's bottom line. It seems that the fastest way to ruin is to piss off a corporation.
The stunt that UMG pulled against the Mega Upload video is proof of that, as is the Geohot and Scrolls lawsuits. Both of which by the way were won by big companies with a lot of weight to throw around squashing the little guys with their legal muscles and intimidating them into giving up without a fight.
Considering that TBP is getting sponsors in record numbers (no pun intended) for its ad banner program I think it's quite clear by now that only abusive companies really have any interest in strengthening IP laws.
Re:Cant stop a moving train (Score:5, Insightful)
pressure will not stop and sooner or later, we'll lose what we have become used to. we've had some good internet days during the last decade or two; but the government AND big business have teamed up to ruin it.
Pardon me for saying it, but I've heard the doomsday prediction that the "wild wild west" days of the Internet is coming to a close now since shortly after I got on in the 90s. Double that after 9/11. P2P was going to die after Napster and torrents were going to die after Suprnova and TPB and most recently file hosting was to die with Megaupload. I don't see that any of that has happened. The music industry has given up DRM protection, the video industry is still in denial but BluRay looks to be practically broken so 1080p content will be on P2P for the foreseeable future and we still got root on our PCs and now on Android on the mobile. The world is not full of Trusted Computing and Remote Attestation to get on the Internet that was supposed to be "imminent".
Their legal campaigns have also honestly not scared many, they're consistently meeting opposition in the courts and so are all their "graduated response" aka "three strikes, you're out" laws except France who surrenders as usual. They can't significantly increase the chance of getting caught - particularly with the explosion it people file sharing - and they won't get public support for the death penalty for file sharing. It's gone beyond the point where they can effectively combat in the courts and people generally react badly to that kind of arbitrary, excessive punishment to the small minority that does get caught.
I honestly think they're losing year for year, with a population that is less and less likely to accept these restrictions. They still haven't "tamed" the first generation of online people and for each year a year of young people can vote and old people die out. It takes a long, long time - from first vote to average life span we're talking 60 years or so and we're maybe 15 years into it since Internet got "mainstream". If there was an election today in Germany the Pirate Party would enter parliament (they've already entered two state parliaments), no offense to my neighbors Sweden but that's a 8-9x bigger country and a leading force in the EU, far stronger than two MEPs in the European Parliament. Meanwhile bandwidth gets faster and cheaper, software gets smarter most bills to store traffic data has died on the drawing board.
My impression is also that more than more places are offering customary wifi service, go into any coffee shop, burger joint, pizza place, gas station, buses, trains, airports, airplanes, hotels, motels or pretty much any company office and they have a wifi for you. True, the number of open home wifis may have declined somewhat but overall I'd say your options are more not fewer. Not to mention that with faster connections even using proxies and whatnot slowing them down you still get decent speeds, the content you want is relatively constant in size. Currently I have 60/60 Mbit and in all honestly (and my inner geek screams to accept this) I'd have zero use for a 1000 Mbit line. Okay I'd have to wait a few seconds shorter on the occasions that I do wait but my total downloads would probably not go up at all.
Re:Only restrict, never grant. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're voting for Republicans or Democrats, YOU are the problem.
Re:Only restrict, never grant. (Score:4, Insightful)
As a non-American, I always wonder how I'd vote.
You've got one party full of fundamentalist Christians wanting to control how other people live their lives. On the other side you've got a bunch of pretend-Christians, who'll let media companies get whatever they want, maintain wars, spend money bailing out big-business, and doing the same as a other team except spending more money in the process.
If I only had the choice between those two, I'd vote Dems (because they seem slightly less religious). But I'd vote for a third party.
It may seem like a wasted vote, but the real wasted votes are for the Democrats or Republicans - doesn't matter which you chose, it's a waste.
Re:Cant stop a moving train (Score:5, Insightful)
The "federal government" isn't writing these bills, the corporations are. And with the new unlimited power to influence elections, only pro-corporate candidates will hold office. These laws are written in secret, by unknown people, and passed in the dark of night.
If you look at the one thing that has changed in the past 80 years, making the government's power onerous, it has been the growing influence of corporations, not just in national elections, but at every level of government down to the school board. I only recently learned that corporate money, Citizens United-style, is not being put into school board elections in parts of the US.
You can limit the power of government all you want, and it's not going to change a thing. We'll just end up dealing with private police, accountable to no one but unelected (and unelectable) corporate entities. You have to know your enemy, and the enemy is the corporatist.
My theory is easily testable: pass public funding of elections, amend the constitution to change "person" to "natural person". Codify "corporations are not people" and "money is not speech" and I believe we'd go a long way toward rolling back the most onerous aspects of what is currently being called the "too-powerful government".
You know, we could also make a huge difference if we just started showing up, in numbers too big to hide in "free speech zones", and started scaring the shit out of the people who are elected.
It's impossible to scare a corporations when we're not even customers of many of the most powerful corporations. But it's relatively easy to scare an elected official, just by showing up. Not signing online petitions. Not blogging about it. Not forwarding angry emails, but by getting up, getting out of the house and go stand in front of the buildings where these politicians do their business.
Re:which presidential candidates would sign this? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Ron Paul, like most libertarians, is that he wants less government control over everyone. In reality, although all men are created equal, not all men end up with equal amounts of power. Those with the most power require the most checks on that power to prevent abuse.
Right now, there are two groups with lots of power: corporate leaders and government officials. If you deregulate businesses, you reduce the amount of government power, while increasing the amount of corporate power. This is not a net gain or a net loss; whether the people with the most power are governments or corporations is immaterial because in the long run, the net effect is the same. You'll still have the same disparity between the power held by an average citizen and whoever has the most power, which means that many (most?) of those who have power will abuse it, and there won't be anything meaningful that the average citizen can do about it when they do.
What makes proper government hard is that the people who most desire power are invariably the ones who are least qualified to wield it, and thus the ones from whom government must protect us the most. This is difficult not only because those sorts of people have a tendency to weasel their way into positions of power within governments, but also because it is very hard to write rules that maximally affect people with power and minimally affect people without it.
The best that can be hoped for is a government that gets it right most of the time, which pretty much requires high taxes on people with lots of money to reduce their ability to grow that money without bounds, treating capital gains (at least above a certain dollar figure) as ordinary income, an outright ban on political contributions made by groups of people who are not acting as individuals (whether that group be a corporation, a union, a PAC, or any other organization), and a few dozen other major fixes that are far enough removed from this discussion that I won't bother mentioning them here.
Note that most of these things are precisely the opposite of what Ron Paul wants. He wants to eliminate the income tax and capital gains taxes, which means that all revenue would be through regressive taxes that further increase the disparity between the rich and the poor, and thus the power difference. His voting record shows that he supports PACs and rejects nearly all manner of campaign finance reform (disclosure rules for donations by lobbyists, limits on soft money ads, etc.). And so on.
In short, Ron Paul is really just another side of the same coin as the Democrats and the Republicans. That's not what we need. What we need is to throw away the rusty old coin entirely and bring in people with fresh ideas.
Re:Only restrict, never grant. (Score:1, Insightful)
> Yeah, there are SOME people who think that homosexuality should be illegal. Well good luck with that. They are a tiny minority. I think it's immoral but even I don't think it should be illegal.
God: These things satirise themselves...
*sardonic laughter echoes throughout the heavens*
Re:Cant stop a moving train (Score:2, Insightful)
Yup, and even if they can't slip it past the public eye, all they need to do is attach it as a rider to the We Love America And The Troops And Kittens Act Of 2013 and it'll pass unanimously.
Everyone really needs to stop making excuses for this stuff and suggesting it will pass. There is no excuse, any attempt to pass such a thing is treason and should be treated as such in respect to all parties affiliated.
Re:Cant stop a moving train (Score:2, Insightful)
1% of human society are also psychopaths infallibly detectable at an early age by testing brain wave reactions due to modern science. So repeating patterns can be broken through the application of modern science. Quite simply psychopaths need to be forbidden from gaining positions of control, governance or influence and, the behaviour extremely constrained. Quite simply problem over.
Re:Cant stop a moving train (Score:5, Insightful)
Unrelated amendments should not be allowed to be attached to any proposed legislation. This kind of nonsense is and always has been an abuse of the system, and has been exploited by both parties forever.
Congress could very easily amend its rules to prohibit unrelated riders to legislation. But since congress-critters are the very animals that benefit from the hidden sleight-of-hand, it's unlikely they would take this course on their own.
We can't even get this done in California, where the Initiative Process lets anything get on the ballot. How can we possibly get this idea passed at the Federal level?