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US Senate Passes the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act 74-21 (dailydot.com)
blottsie writes with news that the U.S. Senate voted 74-21 in favor of CISA, a controversial cybersecurity bill. All five amendments submitted in an attempt to bolster privacy failed to pass. From The Guardian's coverage:
Try asking the bill’s sponsors how the bill will prevent cyberattacks or force companies and governments to improve their defenses. They can’t answer. They will use buzzwords like “info-sharing” yet will conveniently ignore the fact that companies and the government can already share information with each other as is. There were barely any actual cybersecurity experts who were for the bill. A large group of respected computer scientists and engineers were against it. So were cyberlaw professors. Civil liberties groups uniformly opposed (and were appalled by) the bill. So did consumer groups. So did the vast majority of giant tech companies. Yet it still sailed through the Senate, mostly because lawmakers - many of whom can barely operate their own email - know hardly anything about the technology that they’re crafting legislation about.
Blaming ignorance is more credit than they deserve. Willful ignorance is a choice of action, whereas ignorance is sometime forgivable. If they listened to any of the concerned parties they certainly didn't show it here.
Senators don't pass bills they know nothing about, they pass bills they see as having some sort of benefit. Benefits might be popularity, might be to appease donator, might be something darker. What benefit did they get from passing this and from whom? Who encouraged them to pass it?
Another fine piece of legislation co-authored by Dianne Feinstein. What the hell is wrong with California that they have kept this cunt in office for over 20 years?
The actual vote tally shows that both Democrats and Republicans voted for the bill (74 for, 21 against, 5 abstain).
If anyone believes that voting for R (or D) is worse than the other side, or how it's the "lessor of two evils", feel free to explain this.
There are a finite number of votes in any term. When our representatives vote against the interests of the people in all votes, there is no more damage that they can do. There can be no "lesser" evil - they're both at "maximum evil".
I took a look at the text of the recent Iowa poll, the one that puts Carson ahead of Trump that everyone is talking about. I couldn't see any obvious bias (a good thing), but this question stood out:
Which do you think is the bigger risk for the future of the country?
74 To elect a president who has not held office so does not know the processes and procedures of governing
101 To elect the same sort of person who has served as president for many decades who will likely continue to do things the way they have been done with the same effect
25 Not sure
The numbers are total Dem+Rep respondents in the poll.
This is interesting because it shows that Americans (in Iowa, at least) are waking up to the realization that electing career politicians is not in their best interests.
With respect to Democrat readers, your only viable candidate on that side (Hillary Clinton) is a weak contender, while the Republican side appears to have both Trump and Carson as strong candidates.
With respect to the Republican readers, neither of your strong candidates is a career politican. One doesn't need to sell his influence to moneyed interests.
This may be the beginning of the end for career politicians and national parties.
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
Somehow Stewart Brand's original statement got morphed into "information wants to be free."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith
To wipe Microsoft Windows off the face of the Internet would provide more "cybersecurity" to the masses than this spy bill ever could by many orders of magnitude. But were the Senate informed of this common sense approach? It is bundled with new PC's and is in fact malware. It is marketed as helping to improve customer's experience. We are spying on you globally for your own benefit, ya ya. Uh huh.
Microsoft had the actual gall recently to become complete and total global spyware in literal malware fashion (deceit and unwanted installs)... and even adware... at the same time a spy bill gets passed by low-tech Senate career politicians. Red flag.
1) Major proprietary closed source OS goes complete global spyware
2) Internet "cybersecurity" bill goes above and beyond stasi globally soon thereafter (today's news story)
3) Sham election inbound with [perceived choice] of a multi-billionaire, a Jew, or a woman whose email was recovered by the FBI stating "how do I charge my iPad".
This is some Hollywood production type stuff. The motivation for this bill is not innocuous any more than "Secure Boot" was intended to prevent malicious boot code.
Lies and damned lies.
She might win the nomination... there's certainly a good chance. But she's hardly a shoe-in.
Everyone just kinda assumed she win the nom 8 years ago, and that didn't really pan out for her, did it? And she hadn't even committed any felonies then.
If you're good at remembering things, let your mind wander back to the summer of 2008.
Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were both strong candidates with roughly equal support.
Hillary and Barack had a meeting, and soon after Hillary withdrew from the campaign. The Wikipedia article states that she won the popular vote but lost the nomination, but I seem to remember that her campaign lost a lot of steam after that meeting, and before the nomination.
The subtext that I read into that meeting was that the Dems felt that she was splitting the vote, and in return for her withdrawing gracefully and throwing support for Barack she would be the presumptive next nominee.
Then President Obama appointed her Secretary of State, which was also probably a result of that meeting. She got a high-prestige and highly visible position, and gets to practice being president for 8 years. (A good plan, really, and I don't begrudge that sort of deal making - it's how politics is done in this country.)
And now we're in the new cycle, and she's calling in that promise.
The problem is, she was a lackluster Secretary of State. If you assume that the E-mail and the Benghazi thing is unimportant, there's nothing that really stands out in her career.
She's a lukewarm candidate.
The fingerprints of the NSA etc are all over this bill. The only question is whether we will ever discover how many of them were blackmailed into giving it their support. The scale of the vote however does suggest that there was a lot of pressure being exerted.
The phrase 'deep state' was invented to refer to the intelligence community in Turkey that used to have enormous influence in the running of that country. However it is a term which present experience shows it may be more applicable to the US than is nice to think about.