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CISPA Passes US House, Despite Privacy Shortcomings and Promised Veto
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.
I doubt, sincerely, that he'll veto this. Talk and actions are entirely different things. And he's got just as much ass to kiss as anyone else. He'll spin it just like everything else and say: "We're going to keep an eye on this...." Just like he's done before. But, once it's law no eyeball watching will do a damn thing to stop the ball from rolling.
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.
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.
With Liberty and Justice forestalled...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
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
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."