Civil Liberties Groups Speak Out Against CISPA in Lead Up to Hearings

One of the biggest (and most frustrating) problems with the legislative process is that the people who really want this to go through KNOW that we - "the masses" - eventually start to suffer from "protest exhaustion". They can propose a bill - we can rally our troops and get on TV and black out Wikipedia and do 100 interviews and maybe - just maybe - we can kill it.<p>The first time. And maybe the second time. And maybe even the third time. But after a while we're going to start to get numb to the calls-to-arms. And eventually our sometimes-well-intentioned-but-pulled-in-30-directions representatives are going to stop getting those concerned phone calls and emails from constituents, and they're going to fall prey to the typical "think of the children" argument that often gets put forward on any security bill, and something ugly is going to get passed.<p>I hate resigning myself to this, but it's the disappointing reality.<p>What to do?

Supporters include companies like AT&#38;T, Facebook, IBM, Intel, Oracle Corporation, Symantec, Verizon, and Microsoft.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_Intelligence_Sharing_and_Protection_Act#Supporters" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_Intelligence_Sharing_and_...</a><p>I'm envisioning a web dashboard that lets federal agents do fuzzy queries on individuals, to see all the sites visited, emails sent, web searches, browsing habits, etc, from all the IP addresses used by the given individual in the past several years. The system would aggregate information gathered from ISPs and web companies. The government can already get anything they want from an ISP or web company, but they have to do it on a case by case basis and it is probably annoying to correlate information across sources. In the future, I imagine that a federal agent can go to his big brother dashboard, type in a name, and have immediate access to all sorts of information gathered from credit card companies, search providers, ISPs, telecoms.

Just tell the gun lobby that if any of the Gun Shops keep an online database of their customers that's subject to the law. No need to worry about a national gun registry, the GOV gets it for free. Get the NRA involved and ALL OF CONGRESS will run screaming about how this goes against the 2nd Amendment.

As a wise man pointed out on HN the last time around, we haven't won when this law fails to pass. We've only won a law explicitly stating the opposite passes.

The White House petition against it passed 100,000 signatures, too:<p><a href="https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130311/16221022286/white-house-petition-against-cispa-gets-over-100000-signature-threshold.shtml" rel="nofollow">https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130311/16221022286/white...</a>

I am never more reminded of how smart people can succumb to groupthink than I am when I read HN posts about CISPA. There are a lot of misconceptions about the law, including what kind of data gets shared (only relevant threat data, this isn't your bank account info, and the RIAA can't sue you if shared data reveals you to be torrenting movies - can elaborate more on this if there's interest), who does the sharing (orgs share to the government voluntarily), who has access to the sharing (government and people the government decide to share the data with), etc.<p>I saw an infographic a little while back that I thought made a pretty good representation of what the bill actually proposes, I wonder if anyone has a link available to it.

Should we use a the internet bat signal[1] on this issue? What do you guys think? Is it already under discussion?<p>[1] <a href="http://internetdefenseleague.org/" rel="nofollow">http://internetdefenseleague.org/</a>

I supposed I would ask what privacy-protecting language would make the approach envisioned in CISPA (cyber threat data sharing) acceptable to privacy-oriented organizations like the ones listed. If the answer is "none," I would question their good faith in the process--or at least the public face they put on it.

Obligatory Maddox from SOPA 1<p><a href="http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=pass_sopa" rel="nofollow">http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=pass_sopa</a>