This is the part where tptacek says CISPA doesn't do anything particularly bad vs. the state of law now, other people express fairly emotional vs. fact based arguments about what bad it could do, and no one (in industry or government or watchdog groups) really knows for sure what CISPA would, in practice, mean, right?
Sure, why not? Why would you NOT want to avoid all kinds of lawsuits?<p>From our point of view it's disgusting but for upper management it's a no-brainer.
I wouldn't be surprised if this bill simply protected what they're already doing in secret. I'm sure all of these companies already have agreements with the NSA of one kind or another.
So who is TechNet? It's not really fair to cherry-pick from their members when writing a story like this. So let's take a look:<p><a href="http://www.technet.org/leaders/member-companies/" rel="nofollow">http://www.technet.org/leaders/member-companies/</a><p>A headline "Tech group representing AT&T, Palantir backs CISPA" isn't good copy. But that could have been the headline. The "Executive Council" (which seems to be the part of the organization that draws the focus on Google and Yahoo) also contains people from Oracle, Microsoft, and VeriSign. And one thing that council doesn't do is sign off on every letter the group sends out (or, probably, every point in the policy platform it espouses).<p>I <i>doubt</i> without knowing exactly that Google's official position is anti-CISPA and that this group doesn't speak for them because they don't actually control what it says. But I've been surprised in the past.<p>Perhaps, though, people should read this and think "hey, Google ought to put some pressure on the lobbying groups they participate in not to be stupid/evil/whatever." And perhaps if a few Google executives express that they're upset that their names were used in conjunction with something they don't support, they can rein in groups that want to claim the mantle of "the tech industry".
And the erosion of privacy protection in the name of "security" continues unabated.<p>The problem with CISPA is we don't need it. I'm not a libertarian (I want single payer universal health care, for example), but I am fully against the PATRIOT Act, FISA abuse and the numerous other things done in the name of security since 9/11.<p>The reason 9/11 happened was not a lack of security or intelligence; we had those. It was failure to act on the information we had.<p>We shouldn't be putting more power in the hands of intelligence agencies which have no public oversight. I understand the need for those agencies, but I think they should be as small as possible. Things like CISPA seem to be based on an opposite view; giving them as much power as possible.<p>EDIT:<p>Also the notion that you can learn everything you need to know about these bills by reading the bill itself is so myopic as to be comical.
Didn't Google recently file a lawsuit claiming that NSLs which are used to uncover private user information are unconstitutional?<p>Edit: They did [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-04/google-fights-u-s-national-security-probe-data-demand.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-04/google-fights-u-s-n...</a>