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New CISPA Cybersecurity Bill Even Worse Than SOPA
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.'"
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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"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.
On one hand I want to scream at your horrible cynicism and condemn your point of view. On the other hand I think you're completely correct.
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!
..don't panic
The oligarchies of the world do a fair job of controlling media, but they can't control blogs or twitter. They need governments to make sure they can do this for them.
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.
But money can be turned into TV, radio and other advertising, which can buy many more than 10,000 votes.
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.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
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.
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.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
When legislation like this crops up again, after we, the people have already said "No" emphatically, then the legislators supporting this particular shit show need to be immediately, physically and forcibly removed from any and all offices. Period. There is no interest in national security here, this is merely an attempt to grasp at straws. Seeing this kind of crap being birthed from the loins of political prostitutes (even though they're basically the same thing) honestly makes me ashamed to admit that I live in the United States.
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.
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.
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.
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