CISPA Bill Obliterates Privacy Laws With Blank Check of Privacy Invasion

MojoKid writes "At present, the government's ability to share data on its citizens is fairly restricted, insomuch as the various agencies must demonstrate cause and need. This has created a somewhat byzantine network of guidelines and laws that must be followed — a morass of red tape that CISPA is intended to cut through. One of the bill's key passages is a provision that gives private companies the right to share cybersecurity data with each other and with the government 'notwithstanding any other provision of law.' The problem with this sort of blank check clause is that, even if the people who write the law have only good intentions, it provides substantial legal cover to others who might not. Further, the core problem with most of the proposed amendments to the bill thus far isn't that they don't provide necessary protections, it's that they seek to bind the length of time the government can keep the data it gathers, or the sorts of people it can't collect data on, rather than protecting citizens as a whole. One proposed amendment, for example, would make it illegal to monitor protesters — but not other groups. It's not hard to see how those seeking to abuse the law could find a workaround — a 'protester' is just a quick arrest away from being considered a 'possible criminal risk.'"

Comments

Home of the free and the land of the brave?

[Tancred]

How does surrendering our freedom out of fear match up with our motto?

Re:Home of the free and the land of the brave?

[artor3]

The NDAA passed by veto proof majority, and when he tried to close Gitmo the Republicans blocked all funding for the closure.

The GOP strategy for years now had been to block any and all improvement, and then complain that Obama didn't improve things. If the voters are dumb enough to fall for it, then democracy is over. Either the democrats will adopt the same tactics and we'll have no government at all, or they won't and we'll have single party rule.

Despair is starting to set in

[TaoPhoenix]

The pace is accelerating.

We need some kind of Tracking-Data-Armageddon security breach to make the common citizens wake up and realize that we're all just going to stare at each other in a dystopian fishbowl forever while everything just becomes more unfair.

(Satire)
That's all I can type now because I used up my monthly ascii character quota on two tweets of data for $99.95.
(/Satire)