Slashdot Mirror
CISPA 3.0: the Senate's New Bill As Bad As Ever
Daniel_Stuckey writes: "CISPA is back for a third time—it has lost the 'P,' but it's just as bad for civil liberties as ever. The Senate Intelligence Committee is considering a new cybersecurity bill that contains many of the provisions that civil liberties groups hated about the Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). Most notably, under the proposed bill companies could not be sued for incorrectly sharing too much customer information with the federal government, and broad law enforcement sharing could allow for the creation of backdoor wiretaps. The bill, called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2014, was written by Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and is currently circulating around the committee right now but has not yet been introduced. Right now, the bill is only a 'discussion draft,' and the committee is still looking to make revisions to the bill before it is officially introduced."
Will no one rid me of this turbulent senator?
So in a sense, it's 5 past 12.
Version 3.0, 4.0, infinity, it must be stopped!!!!
On May 5th, 9pm EST....let's all think of Diane Fienstein dying of a natural cause. And see if thoughts actually influence the universe.
They will simply continue to refluff the bill and push it on us again and again until it passes.
The US government is a corrupt oligarchy and needs to be torn down.
Oh, look, Feinstein is once again taking action to fuck over the populace while positioning herself (and friends) in the elite ruling class.
Isn't that shocking?
I think it would be nice if congress went on recess forever instead of returning to enact shit like this.
This is all due to your legal bribing you americans call "lobbying" that sh*t like this keep coming back.
Agree with them or not, the NRA knows what is needed to protect their favorite amendment.
We need to adopt similar structures and systems. To me, the EFF is a good rallying point, so I urge you to give all the support you can. I say, without irony, "Think of your children."
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Another "I am not a crook" politician wants the law to turn you all into honest serfs. Be just like her, but without a voice or a choice, or innocent until proven guilty.
I noticed you left out Saxby Chambliss.
At least it isn't fast tracked and hidden or part of official state secrets that can't be asked about even by people who can ask about them.
Me, except they would build a wall around me, just like they did Jimmy Carter.
We only need a single law that can act like a wedge to start breaking open this cesspool we call government.
Start with a real whisteblower law.
Throwing that shit at the wall. Eventually it will stick.
When we are continually faced with things like this, year in and year out?
Posting as ac because I don't have an account.
Not saying it's right, just that it's so.
Subject: CISPA version 3.0 - Also known as Feinstien's CISA
Right now, Senator Feinstien (D-CA) and Sen. Chambliss (R-GA) are currently circulating around a "discussion draft" of a bill called "Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2014." This is just as bad for civil liberties as the original CISPA - the Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act - and I would appreciate it, assuming that this bill actually makes it out of comittee, if you were to vote against it. Please remember that every vote you make influences our civil rights, and give or denies political currency to those who wish to curtail them. This bill will attract national and international attention from those people, both allies and enemies of the United States, who wish to justify the suppression of the rights of others. If, by allowing this bill to pass, we create an environment where neither the Bill of Rights or the Constitution are respected in the digital realm, what is to prevent future politicians from pointing at CISA and saying "Oh.. look, these politicians did it here, so we can get away with doing worse here" in the physical realm. CISA basically brings the concepts of "guilt by association," "wiretaps everywhere," "constructive prosecution," and "ubiquitous permanent surveillance" from NSA's Big Data (Facebook, Twitter, etc) wish-list to actuality. The security, privacy, and rights of future generations of American, and likely the world's, citizens are in your hands. Please be as vigilant in defending our rights as you are with yours.
Some of you apparently don't understand how things really are.
The US government is set up for the benefit of a tiny number
of wealthy people. All the rest of us are along for the ride and
we get milked like a cow.
They must be feeling pretty secure if they don't need to pretend they're protecting us.
Maybe she's just phishing for love bites!
We should be grateful that republicans and democrats come together in our time of need to provide a *safe and secure society*.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You guys need more government power/control over information and the internet (in your country) in general like I need a hole in my head. Why is this constantly being brought up for serious consideration?
You don't get people debating the merits/demerits of laws against murder or rape being brought up every 6 months, with the real possibility of such laws being abolished. Why do you have to keep bringing this issue to the fore when it's blatantly obvious that it does almost no-one in your country any good.
If people are arguing that there's a problem with copyright infringement, then why not debate abolishing copyright law. This would certainly fix the problem and has far less burdensome drawbacks (indeed, in my book, there are no drawbacks).
Oh, sure, that'll work. Those nice senators are always SO ready to listen to people's phone calls. I'm sure they just sit around all day hoping that someone will call them and tell them what to do, because they just get so much pleasure out of serving the people. I mean, they just put so MUCH importance on the will of the people. Guess that's why their approval rating is so gosh-darn high.
Deja Moo: The distinct feeling that you've heard this bull before.
This is getting tiresome.
They'll never take the internet down. If Karl Marx famously said "Religion is the opiate of the masses", I'm afraid the internet makes heroin look like a nice cup of warm milk.
There was a time - back in the 1960's it was - when liberals stood for individual rights, goodness, decency, doing the right thing, trying to strike a balance...all that shit. Nowadays they are just Fascists teaching themselves to be Nazis.
"God doesn't exist, so praying to it doesn't do any good."
I just love it whan some idiot posts something like this... it SOUNDS so intellectual and sciencey and all that jazz... except of course that the statement is simply an unproven assertion no more valid than any religious assertion.
Of course the REAL kicker to the stupid claim is that you probably do not actually believe it. Let's see:
You probably assert that everything started from nothing, for no particular reason, in a "Big Bang" and that all the universe is simply a mechanical ordering of the debris from that explosion, with all life being simply the evolved results of some random electric charge hitting some primordial ooze. Fine. That's the materialistic view that science (being content to only focus on things it can observe and measure, and therefore intentionally and properly blinding itself to any alternate discussions) currently supports. I'm all for science doing what science does - studying what it CAN study and limiting its claims to what fits within those bounds. I have however never met anybody who lives as though he believes this to be the ultimate "truth" of the reality we occupy.
Beginning with that materialistic world-view, you get no rational origin for morality or ethics (beyond something like "whatever feels good is good, as long as I can get away with it" or "whatever advances evolution is good"). Unfortunately for you, evolution is an unguided mechanical scheme with no principles or values so there's no such thing as "good" or "bad" mutation or "more-advanced" or "less-advanced" life forms (any step "forward" may not be "better"). You have no anchor point for terms like "good" or "bad" (in either the "moral" sense or the qualitative sense). There's no reason to care for children since there's no reason to care about the fate of any descendents (the moment you die, you become nothing and therefore know nothing and care about nothing - so caring about those things while you live only becomes a form of irrational self-delusion that does not even "advance" evolution or existence (which also do not matter since there is no point to the whole universe)). It does not even matter if your descendants are hyper-intelligent humans, or primitive devolved ape-like creatures... the universe does not care.
In point of fact, in a purely materialistic universe, there's no "value" to life at all - a planet is no "better" or "worse" if it's a barren rock or a lush tropical world covered in life - eventually all the energy will run-down and the universe will be a cold, dead, expanded place and NOTHING any human ever did will matter one little bit and to pretend otherwise now (to make you feel better) is just self-delusion. Do you "love" somebody? Why? Just use them and throw them away (or dine on them). Do you hate somebody? Why bother? If he's in your way, just eliminate him, there's no need to waste a moment's energy hating him. In a materialistic universe, love or hate is only a delusion... and it cannot even be "meant" to exist for some other purpose (like to trick you into reproducing and protecting your offspring) given that this would imply some sort of design or purpose which cannot exist. Indeed, evolution and life itself would only be meaningless accidents in the universe you apparently think you believe in. Actually, there's no reason to even try to live a little longer in your universe - it's not cosmically significant if you do, and everybody you know will eventually die (forgetting that you ever existed in the process). You might try to claim that your presence is part of a long evolutionary chain that leads to some bright distant future for some descendents .... but that too is irrational: you'll never know them, they'll never know you, and they too will eventually die-off without ever having had a reason to exist anyway. Nothing you do has permanence or "matters" in the long-run, and the same is true fore everybody else and all the generations of descendan
Answer this question: Where were the GOA when Democrats were murdering blacks in the south and passing "gun control" laws to keep them disarmed? It was the NRA (founded in 1871 shortly after the civil war) that helped black men in the south to arm themselves to defend themselves and their families from the Klan. Oh, I KNOW that the democrats who run politifact don't like this and have tried hard to debunk this stuff (go there and read their "debunking"). Politifact attacks a specific claim that the NRA was founded by religious people to help blacks (and then finding no evidence either way on the religiosity claim or the purpose-of-founding claim, pronounces the whole concept "preposterous" - an unsubstantiated judgement call in itself) The politifact crew appears to hope that nobody notices they have no answer to the actual meat of the matter: that it's a historical fact that post-slavery Democrats (both in and out of the Klan) implented the so-called "black codes" in the south which included bans on black people owning guns - and the further fact that those Democrats formed posse-like groups and went around grabbing guns from blacks, and the NRA was on the side of blacks having the right to keep and bear arms.
The NRA gets most of its money, grassroots support (and voters who vote) from individual American gun owners NOT a few gun makers. GOA can keep pretending to be the top 2nd Amendment edvocates, but they seem (to me) to spend as much time going after the NRA as after the gun grabbers - NOT an effective strategy.
A couple historical notes for those who have been brainwashed about the whole Republican vs Democrat thing in reguards to the Klan, and black American gun rights:
"What is the President's plan? Is it to leave them to the Black Codes? Is it to call them free, thereby exasperating the late masters, and then suffer those masters unchecked to forbid them to own property, to bear arms, to testify, and to enjoy any of the rights of freedom?" - Harper's Weekly, 14 Apr 1866
"The significant fact in all this lawlessness and terror is that it is chiefly political. The masked blow of the Ku-Klux always falls upon some loyal man, black or white, and always upon a Republican. Democrats are unharmed. It is not a terror for those who attempted to destroy the government during the war, but for those who sustained it. The conclusion is irresistible that it is an organization of Democrats. This fact is made still more unquestionable by the denials and sneers of Northern Democrats. They call it rawhead and bloody-bones, a bugaboo of scared radicals, and a device invented to authorize military coercion of Democratic districts. But if every victim in the Southern States who is taken from his home and scourged, or mangled, or murdered were a Democrat instead of a Republican, how the land would ring with the cry that a radical Administration abandoned innocent citizens to the tender mercies of savages!" - Harper's Weekly, 4 Nov 1871
For destroying your own cloud industry and giving companies in other countries a better market. I hear already commercials each morning on the radio when I drive to work about a local Dutch company (KPN) advertizing their cloud because no forieghn governments have access to it.
Cisco and Juniper will be pleased too when they find that more customers move to Huawei. At least the Chinese are not interested in "regime changes" in other countries.
At this juncture, it is increasingly apparent that both political and economic special interests are working aggressively to distort, abridge and minimize the collective value of an open Internet that respects individual rights. The the mechanism to make this possible lies in the mutually-supporting efforts of politicians (legislature and executive in most parties) and various special-interest groups (corporate, political, ethnic, "security," religious).
What I humbly propose is the foundation of a absolutist, single-issue, advocacy/political group with ability and willingness to derail, disrupt and destroy the cabal of politicians and special-interest groups who are actively destroying the public internet and subvert it to the whims of powerful special-interests, going as far as codifying the rights into constitutional laws. The National Rifle Association has proved the success of this model in the U.S. so there is a precedent for an organization to gain potency and credibility.
The battle has started, and it's now time to fight.
PLEASE no politics articles without a call to action
Here we go again. As politics is not an additive art, one hopes that the they managed to lean no lessons last time. One also hopes that the recent revelations will help make it easier for the public to see that unfettered 'We need all the powers, so trust us' lacks credibility.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
So, to follow on from PRISM and the decision this week that all data stored in a cloud run by a US company is available to anyone in US law enforcement, Congress wants to complete the task of throwing the US IT industry under a bus? No US company can be sued for giving any information they have to the government without permission? What are they thinking of?
It doe not matter if you are "happier" or if anybody is "nice". "Happy" is just an irrational intangible happening inside your skull; it won't last, it does not advance the state of the universe, etc.
In a materialistic sense happiness is completely irrational unless it exists to trick an organism into some biologically useful activity... but of course THAT cannot be true because evolution is an entirely unguided and undesigned process with no "goal", so there's no reason for it to trick any organism into any path.
As for everybody being "nice" to avoid conflict and perhaps enable everybody to live longer and healthier thereby reproducing more and spreading life further, this too is irrational. With their being no "point" to the universe, there's no reason to, nor benefit from, the action of spreading or extending life. Why should any organism strive to reproduce at all? the activity takes away time, energy, and other resources the organism might prefer to expend on other activities and the organism gets no lasting benefit (once the organism dies it no longer knows or cares that it had offspring). Therefore, the only reasons, in a materialistic universe, for you to "treat others nicely" is so they do not attack you - i.e. it's a defensive mechanism for creatures who are not suited to more-effectively defending themselves. In other words, it's a form of "if I don't upset them, they might not kill me". That's fine, as long as they are equally timid and irrational, but it breaks down if they get hungry or decide to amuse themselves at your expense. Again, however, I have to question why in your materialistic wonderland it matters one jot that you live a little longer or with a little more comfort? You ARE going to die eventually and when you do your brain will shut-down, forgetting everything.... all the knowledge you spent years learning, all the sensations you felt, the beauty and ugliness you saw, everything. All will be lost, so at that moment and for the rest of time, the happiness and niceness you apprently value will evaporate, having been exposed as just silly stuff you deluded yourself with.
I assert that you do, indeed, "need to fear gods, cops, or parents" to treat others well - as a Slashdotter you probably are in a nation with a Judeo-Christian tradition (but even if you are in a Muslim nation THIS point applies) which has provided your culture with a basic set of definitions for "good" "bad" "nice" etc. and you probably behave so that the authorities in your culture do not arrest you and punish you. Why else would you not attampt to mate mate with every person you encounter, take everything you want or need, and kill anybody who annoys or obstructs you? Why would you impose ANY limits on your own behavior that in any way hampers your access to resources or sensations?
As I said before: I have never met anybody who tries to live consistently with the materialistic world view he espouses, even though the advocates of that set of beliefs often insist their beliefs are true and any religious beliefs are irrational or delusional. Serious religious people, whether you agree with their beliefs or not and whether their beliefs are right or not, tend to at least TRY to follow their beliefs.
Science has a limited set of man-made tools. These tools are as limited in capability and as flawed as man, and therefore can only see what mankind is capable of seeing. There's NOTHING wrong with this, but it must be kept in mind. The universe could be very much more complex than mankind is capable of comprehending and as a result man's observations of it will never be correct but will be man's best approcimation of reality. Again, there's NOTHING wrong with that and that's NOT an attack on science - it's the proper understanding of what science is and what it is not. It's completely possible that man will never understand exactly what gravity is and how it actually works, but Newton gave us a good approximation of its behavior (one that's suited us well for a very long time) and eventually science will give us the best understanding humans are capable of having. Our descendants will be happy enough with that understanding and make good use of it, but it might not be a complete and precise undertstanding.
Religion is similarly limited by man's limitations. Religion provides man with a framework for thinking about everything from God (or gods) to intangibles like morality, ethics, and values. Assuming the existence of a God (in the traditional sense of some super-being not contrained by the universe) man, as a limited creature (and also man, as a limited species) will clearly never be capable of fully understanding that God - so religion is where we plug-in what we know, or think we know, or believe, etc about God. As such, "religion" will never provide us with a complete and accurate picture of God - just an approximation.
The trap it is easy to fall into is to go politically-correct and, takeing the path of least resistance, declare that some things are "spiritually true", belonging in some "religious" realm, and other things are "physically true", belonging in the realm of science. This is irrational and schizophrenic. What's true is true and what's false is false; something cannot be "spiritually true" but actually false. If there is no God, then religions which say there is one are simply WRONG and should be abandoned. IF there actually is a God, and science is unable to see that God (which is ok, and understandable) and then that science leaps to declare that there is no God (a blind "leap of faith" that is false if the premise of this sentence is taken) then THAT science is false and needs to be abandoned. If God actually exists and science, being unable to detect any God, takes no position on the subject then that science is good and correct. Again, however, if there is a God and science cannot detect him/her/it then that does NOT mean God does not exist nor does it mean belief in God is anti-science; In THAT situation, God is an actual fact, no different than, for example cosmic rays - something science at some point knew nothing about.
if your religion or your science requires you to become intellectually-schizophrenic and think things are "spiritually true but actually false" or "spiritually false but actually true" then you need to figure out what's wrong with your religion, your use and understanding of science, or both.
With that said, I'm obliged to point out that large corporations know which side their bread is buttered on. They play ball with governments because that's how they prosper. They - a vague and undefined group - may rely upon us for their income, but they need them (the governments of the world) to keep doing what they do. I've often pointed out that corporations aren't interested in protecting our (consumers) interests, only theirs. You can't even blame them for doing so - it's why they exist, and it's what perpetuates their existence.
Governments (IMHO) are a different matter. If there's ever going to be an opportunity to fix anything, it relies on (fat, internet-addicted, lazy) people like me to force our governments once more to behave like res publica, instead of viewing me and people like me as the opposition.
Moderation is about intelligence of post - not about personal agreement or disagreement.