CISPA Passes US House, Despite Privacy Shortcomings and Promised Veto 231
An anonymous reader writes with a story at the Daily Dot: "Despite the protests of Internet privacy advocates, the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) passed the House of Representatives Thursday. The vote was 288-127. ... CISPA saw a handful of minor amendments soon before passage. A representative for the EFF told the Daily Dot that while they were still analyzing the specifics, none of the actual changes to the bill addressed their core criticisms. ... But also as was the case the year before, on Tuesday the Obama administration issued a promise to veto the bill if it reaches the president’s desk without significant changes."
Techdirt has a short report on the vote, too — and probably more cutting commentary soon to follow.
Veto ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
90% (Score:5, Insightful)
90% was the percentage of the American people that thought reasonable background checks should have been passed.
Put aside what you think about that sort of thing and ask yourself... is this the way things are supposed to work? We live a country that is supposed to be ruled by the majority (through elected officials) with respect to the rights of the minority. The legislation respected the right of the minority and then some.
The Congress is completely unhinged. They don't represent constituencies, they represent lobbyist dollars. And we see it again with CISPA.
Not surprised... (Score:2, Insightful)
Republicans would see the U.S changed into a society where the rich and powerful are immune to laws and everyone else is subject to monitoring 24 hours a day.
Re:Veto ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Veto ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, his record on kept promises is pretty dismal, not that it really matters. Nobody cares enough to vote the Party out of power.
Re:90% (Score:5, Insightful)
Except you're wrong about the US being "Majority Rule".
We are a Republic, and our representatives have a responsibility to ensure than legislation conforms to the Constitution (not that they actually DO do this, just saying what they're supposed to do). They, in fact, have a responsibility to NOT vote in conformance with the wishes of the public when the public is straight up =wrong=.
Granted, there is absolutely a lot of corruption, but you are very, very mistaken that they should vote according to the public majority polls.
ONE NATION, UNDER SURVEILLANCE (Score:3, Insightful)
With Liberty and Justice forestalled...
Re:90% (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a republic for you, the majority doesn't have full control, elected representatives do. If they then tell the majority to fuck off and choose to enrich and empower themselves instead, and this cycle repeats forever, welp...???
Re:Veto ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
I find myself at an impasse. I can vote for the party that makes the right promises then doesn't keep them, or the party that makes all the wrong promises and does keep them. This leaves me vacillating between futile hope and grotesque masochism. Where are the guys that make the RIGHT promises and keep them? Where are they hiding those guys? Oh! Right. I forgot. You can't buy the right guys. Therefore you can't sell them to the public.
Re:Veto ??? (Score:4, Insightful)
The right people can be voted in to power, but you have to start at the local level and you have to keep up a running dialogue with them. You also have to spend your time, your money, and your energy to make sure they get elected. That's the problem with the American political system, the people are too lazy to do anything, but complain.
Re:Veto ??? (Score:2, Insightful)
You also have to spend your time, your money, and your energy to make sure they get elected.
That's a feature, not a bug. "A republic, if you can keep it"
That's the problem with the American political system, the people are too lazy to do anything, but complain.
No, that's a problem with people.
Re:Veto ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the problem with the American political system, the people are too lazy to do anything, but complain.
Do you have any idea of the personal time and energy needed to change things?
The rich people/corporations can pay somebody else to do it for them. The guy in the street can't. Hence the system.
(Robert Heinlein's "Take Back Your Government" is basically this).
Not one post about what's actually in the bill (Score:5, Insightful)
I looked in vain for something to mod up.
Nearly all discussion here is about the much-hyped topic of corporations possibly turning over private data on consumers to the gubmint in the name of cyber security.
While this may or may not be of concern, most of CISPA is an update to FISMA, the law that mandates how federal government information systems are acquired and what security measures are to be implemented.
So far zero on-topic discussion here.
Re:Veto ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where are the guys that make the RIGHT promises and keep them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_party_(United_States) [wikipedia.org]
Re:Veto ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Senate would also need a vote of 67 "yea" tallies to override a veto. They can't even get 60 votes on a lunch order, much less a veto override - and this is also considering that the majority of the Senate is the same political party as the President.
A veto would stick.
Re:Veto ??? (Score:4, Insightful)
So you are obviously not voting the right people into office. It's like picking potential wives at the bar, then expecting them to A) Not go to bars, and B) stop drinking, after you get married. If you want a person to stay at home and not drink, you probably won't find her at a bar.
Unfortunately many people lack the ability to see things rationally. I blame our education system personally, as the citizen's education must follow rules imposed by the Government.
Re:Handing over our Rights (Score:5, Insightful)
The correct solution is to forbid government this power to begin with. That, more than anything else, is the core teaching of the US Constitution.
It amazes me how many here buy into the propaganda that anyone who desires that the government obey the US Constitution's limits to the government's scope and powers is somehow an "extremist".
For those confused, let me put the basic idea of the Constitution into different terms.
The US Constitution is the design for a distributed network.
It's a network of power, no different in basic principles to a computer network. The Constitution lays out the basis for a distributed network, with self-checking and redundancy built into the design. The purpose of the design is to distribute political power and it's exercise rather than concentrate it centrally, as basic network security principles assert that a distributed network is much harder to globally (in a systems sense) corrupt than simply compromising a single point of control.
Too much power has been concentrated in one place (the Federal government) over the last 100 years or so and therefor various interests fight for control, as it gives them a way to change things across the entire nation. If power were more distributed, it would be orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive to enact nationwide corrupt laws/policies/etc. Why would some special interest try to bribe/corrupt a member or branch/agency/dept. of the federal government if they don't have the power to do what they want in the first place?
Seriously, I don't understand how so many Slashdotters who in other threads show the ability to understand and point out similar flaws in complex computer and network security systems totally fail to grasp, or dismiss out of hand, the above concepts when applied to networks/systems of political power and the exercise thereof.
This should not be rocket surgery for a bunch of card-carrying Slashdot nerds and geeks, unless they've sold their geek cards to emotional rather than logical identity politics and class warfare, and abandoned logic and intellectual honesty to join in succumbing to emotional mob-mentality political/ideological mass-manipulation.
The authors of the US Constitution were genius systems engineers who were far ahead of their time. From many comments I read almost daily, I suspect they remain far ahead of many in this "modern" age as well, including many if not most of the leaders of both political parties and our elected & unelected officials in the Federal Government.
Strat
Re:Veto ??? (Score:3, Insightful)
See also: leveling the playing field.
Re:Veto ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
I find myself at an impasse. I can vote for the party that makes the right promises then doesn't keep them, or the party that makes all the wrong promises and does keep them. This leaves me vacillating between futile hope and grotesque masochism.
That's a false dilemma. Voting for Democrat/Republican is not your only choice. Keep voting for liars, thieves and sociopaths, and that's what you'll always wind up with.
Where are the guys that make the RIGHT promises and keep them? Where are they hiding those guys?
In the third parties. They might not win, but you'll maintain whatever integrity you have, and you'll send an important message.
Oh! Right. I forgot. You can't buy the right guys. Therefore you can't sell them to the public.
If they're on the ballot, you can vote for them — spread the word.
Re:Veto ??? (Score:4, Insightful)
no publicly elected official who matters is opposed.
Might have something to do with the fact that the last one who actually mattered was deposed [wikipedia.org]...
Re:Veto ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps the best way is these days, to follow the constitution. 1 representative per 30,000 people.
It's doable these days - you don't have to fit all 10,000 reps in one building - we have telecommuting, after all.
This has enormous implications.
First, pay will have to be cut dramatically - I believe the original founding fathers expected politicians to sacrifice themselves for political life. We can easily do this by making their pay equal to the median of the people they represent (not the average).
The problem is that the early politicians were mostly independently wealthy. Remember where they came from. They were a bunch of high ranking Masonic idealists who had a personal interest in making their new country work. Where can you find such idealists these days? That is, who are competent and willing to dedicate their lives? I'm not seeing ANY hands raised in this crowd.
Second, corporate influence has just gone down significantly. When you have a company spending $1B on campaign contributions, that's rougly $2M per representive right now. With 10,000 of them, that's $100K apiece, or just over $3 per person they're representing. Companies wanting to buy laws suddenly have to pay a whole lot o more money. And the amount can actually be raised by individuals in the community.
The amount of money is not the problem. It's the fact that it's business as usual for the politicians. You don't get elected without the help of the rich and wealthy. They will make sure that their people are the ones who win the elections. So they need more lower paid flunkies. How does that solve anything.
Third, more local representation - because they're going to represent a smaller slice of the population, so it's a lot easier to actually see what people in the community want. And with lowered pay, they get to see the same problems everyone else in the community has.
Fourth, less whipping possible - you try keeping the entire party in line - if we assume half and half, you try keeping 5,000 people in line - it's a lot harder.
Nor does that solve anything. Every small community has their own agenda, and with all of them arguing over who's priorities are important, we'll get even less done.
No, the problem is that there is no longer any sense of work or sacrifice of personal comfort for the common good. We are a country of "us" verses "them" in everything that we do. Everything is competition, and nothing is cooperation. Hell, how many people here are big on free market competition? As long as everyone fights to can change the system so that they can personally benefit, be it through lucrative middle class tech jobs or whatever, then it will always be "us against them."
All that we can do at this point is slow the decline of this once (arguably) great nation and avoid total collapse in our lifetimes. The parallels between the US and the last days or Rome are not just a cliche. I personally find it more interesting to think about what we can form out of the rubble when we start to rebuild. How should we do it differently next time? The US system was a great improvement on the parliamentary monarchy. We saw communism torn down through corruption even faster than our system. Where did we go wrong? How did the sociopathic assholes take over, and how do we avoid that? Dunno, but food for thought.
Re:Veto ??? (Score:3, Insightful)
So you are obviously not voting the right people into office.
Obviously, since a person fit to govern will not want to.
Re:Veto ??? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the problem is larger and more systematic than you make out. Citizen "apathy, ignorance, and fear" isn't created in a vacuum from the personal character flaws of individual citizens. These are shaped by the pervasive propaganda influence that a wealthy ruling class can wield over the entire citizenry --- an art refined to a science over the past century. When every news channel, every radio station, every newspaper and magazine advocates on behalf of the ruling class (even while providing the appearance of choice, on less critical matters, between factions of the Capitalist Party) --- even citizens who make a decent effort to be well-informed and civic-minded are left crippled of the ability to think outside the frameworks set by their corporate masters (and "respectable, educated" citizens become unwitting tools advocating the protection of corruption). Rather than starting at the ballot box, the real "battle" to be won is that of education (countering and subverting the dominant narratives that shape public acceptance of the system); without laying this foundation, no worthwhile change (by voting or other means) will be achieved.
If voting could change anything, they'd make it illegal.
-attributed to Emma Goldman
Re:Handing over our Rights (Score:4, Insightful)
The authors of the US Constitution were genius systems engineers who were far ahead of their time. From many comments I read almost daily, I suspect they remain far ahead of many in this "modern" age as well, including many if not most of the leaders of both political parties and our elected & unelected officials in the Federal Government.
But alas, they failed to check for security holes in the design. Political parties and lobbyists have done an end-run around most of the checks built into the system.