CISPA is back
cispaisback.com
cispaisback.com
"CISPA is supported by several trade groups containing more than eight hundred private companies ... in addition to individual major telecommunications and information technology companies like ... Facebook ..." [1]
Why would Facebook support CISPA?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_Intelligence_Sharing_and_...
Worth noting here that CISPA is entirely opt-in.
The campaign against it was led by political groups looking to trade on the acronym's similarity to SOPA to build their lists.
I like Snowwrestler's comment that its an attempt a building a mailing list for later political action, that is very optimistic. Given the state of the world and the not so low level annoyances for people with means that various hacktivists have inspired or created one wonders if this might be a partial response.
We just got another demonstration that when the federal government sets its sights are arming Jihadists on American soil they can find someone stupid enough to take them up on it. [1]
[1] http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/02/08/fbi-helps-thwart...
This is, in political terms, a customer acquisition strategy. CISPA is merely the "power word" they hope will create enough emotional response that you'll fill out the form.
(This is primarily what the campaign against CISPA always was. You can tell because the Senate cyber bill was far more intrusive, but the anti-CISPA groups did not campaign against it.)
However, the Senate was a lot more of an inside game strategy. We focused on an amendment strategy through Sen. Franken's and Sen. Paul's offices (my primary contact was with Sen. Franken's staff): https://www.eff.org/pages/no-digital-big-brother-keep-milita...
The feeling was that we couldn't stop the Cybersecurity Act after CISPA won the House, but we could improve it enough to make the final result slightly less awful. We wanted both acts dead.
We were entirely wrong though. Business interests killed Cybersecurity because of questions of mandates vs. voluntary buy-in. With opposition led by the Chamber of Commerce, the Senate bill died twice to filibusters. Privacy never became an important part of the debate, sadly.
PS - None of this disputes OP's very valid points about the purpose of the site and customer acquisition. However, FFtF is not trying to corral our votes, it's trying to direct our energy away from social media (which DC considers noise) to effective phone calls to our elected officials. Yes, they use their mailing lists to raise funds through donations. So does EFF and other groups engaged on open internet issues.
No, it would not have. Even had it not been designed to do essentially the opposite, it couldn't have, because it was an opt-in measure. Being in a hurry does not excuse this level of wrongness.
source?
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/281309-r...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-08/obama-said-near-iss...
"I received notice on a technology message board that CISPA is being reintroduced with an executive order. The previous bill, which was shot down a few years ago, would have infringed upon our God-granted rights. Now that it is being reinstated, I wanted to express my concern for the citizens of America, who, with every day, and every tick of the clock, are subject to a more powerful and potentially tyrannical government that is eroding their privacy and rights one by one.
I would also like to express to the administration that they are merely public servants, and nothing more. The citizens of the United States are their rulers, not vice versa. This administration, and the previous Republican one, are by far the worst in terms of right infringement. The PATRIOT Act, the Section 1021 of the NDAA 2012, and now CISPA have all but erased the privacy of American citizens.
They may not mind now, but the American citizens know about their government. We the people of the United States are not blind. We can see through the smoke and mirrors that the bars of government continue to put up. If you erode our rights, we will be upset. And when we are upset, you will lose your jobs, your credibility, your haughtiness, and your confidence.
Remember, a volcano never stays dormant forever."
Any thoughts? Or should I just start one of those seemingly useless petitions on WhiteHouse.gov?
Feel free to use the above text if you're going to contact your senators or the like.
That's not what I believe at all. I'm just saying that there needs to be a less broad approach to CISPA and that there needs to be a more clear explanation as to what exactly can or cannot be tracked, because with the current legislation, indefinite snooping of innocent individuals is possible under it.
The bill itself is fine. It is by no means the same as SOPA or PIPA, but it's also poorly written and allows companies and the U.S. Government to exploit citizens. That's what people need to get attention to. The website that this post links to is misleading; look at some other sources of information to see what really is going on.
When you answer that, try to capture what it was that companies couldn't do before CISPA and could have done after CISPA, and how they'd have had any incentive to use CISPA as their vector to do those things.
While you won't reach your representative directly, the staffers do pass on the feedback to the representative (each office is different, some will read each piece of mail while others only get summaries of what people in general are communicating about).
A representative democracy works only when you actually communicate to your representative what your interests are.