CISPA Internet Privacy Legislation
CISPA Internet Privacy Legislation
CISPA is a far reaching piece of legislation currently moving through Congress, that will give the Government and other private corporations vast new powers to monitor, retain, and share information about everyone’s internet and texting use. It provides intentionally vague grounds for being able to start such gathering, provides full immunity from prosecution for all, and overrides all other national, state, and local laws prohibiting or limiting such gathering. There is a severe lack of oversight and accountability established for all these new activities.
Today, the Republican-controlled House accomplished a Surprise! vote on the bill (it was supposed to have been voted on tomorrow), and passed it largely on party lines. So now it goes to the Senate, where it will be debated in the coming weeks.
Yesterday, President Obama said he would Veto the bill in its current form, but to me his reasons seemed rather weak, and potentially could be countered by simply adding some equally vague amendments.
Summary of a few related links:
1) The House version as detailed on POPVOX:
https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/hr3523
2) Electronic Freedom Foundation’s info page on the legislation:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/04/cybersecurity-bill-faq-disturbing-privacy-dangers-cispa-and-how-you-stop-it
3) Roll Call vote in the House:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2012/roll192.xml
5) How CISPA would affect you (CNET):
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57422693-281/how-cispa-would-affect-you-faq/
At the moment, I’ve seen several petition drives coming online to address the issue for the Senate, such as http://act.demandprogress.org/letter/cispa_passes
but I still like the POPVOX site ( https://www.popvox.com/ ) for its unbiased and effective ability to get public comments directly to the legislators in one’s own district or state. As of the moment they don’t have a bill page up for the Senate version, but I will post the URL here as soon as I see it.
