Located in: Opinions
Posted on: April 29th, 2012 No Comments

‘Users’ petitioning against CISPA


While protestors and fellow “activists” were occupied with SOPA, a different cyber-security bill snuck its way into congressional deliberation. CISPA is the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. It allows both private business and the government to share information about cyber-threats. This may appear harmless, but it is extremely vague in its definitions of cyber-threats. According to CISPA, cyber-threats are any effort to degrade, disrupt or destroy vital networks, or anything that poses a threat or misappropriation of information owned by the government or private business. Thus, intellectual property rights are infringed upon. The primary question here is; what constitutes CISPA to make that decision?

So how does CISPA work? While SOPA put companies at risk for subscriber activity, CISPA turns it into a game of reward. Companies are rewarded for collecting data, intercepting or modifying communications and providing government with information. Contrary to SOPA, CISPA does not threaten the business interests of web companies. We should not expect big business’ help in combating this bill. In fact, companies already supporting CISPA include: AT&T, Verizon, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, and Intel.

Have fears of the Big Brother crept down your spine yet? Then you should also know that information collected from you is proprietary, meaning you do not have the right to know what is being gathered. Under CISPA, companies can also share your addresses, phone numbers and names from the data they give to the government.

CISPA has gathered over 100 congressional co-sponsors. However, this atrocity is recently beginning to appear on the public radar. This is in part because the user is under the influence of the bill’s co-sponsors. Without the motivation and guidance provided by these networks, we, the people, have been doped. As George Orwell put it, “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

Sign the petition at www.avaaz.org/en/stop_cispa/.

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