CISPA is back with a new name | Hacker News Reader

CISPA is back with a new name

cispaisback.org

259 pointsfur0n41 comments

Just so you know, they're pulling the same kind of shit over here in the UK: "emergency powers" being pushed through with barely a debate by an unelected PM, his lapdog deputy in the Lib Dems, and a weak opposition, with tripartisan support thanks to the party whips. No one even really knows or understands what they're agreeing to, the "temporary" shouldn't fool anyone as it can be extended (and it would be an 'emergency' not to, wouldn't it?) - and the real kicker is that the "emergency" is the EU courts have ruled the UK's existing mass data retention laws contravene our human rights, so the UK Government's response is to… pass another mass data retention law as a matter of urgency, explicitly before ISPs start deleting (unlawfully collected) data.

What the fuck. Sometimes politicians just disgust me. We could use some help over here too - Pirate Party UK, maybe, or the Green Party?

Could an alternative DNS system fix this? Tor for DNS that both masked the lookup and the resulting IP would stop any type of filtering/blocking/take down etc? Coupled with https, to stop packet inspection?

Social and political problems are rarely fixed with engineering solutions.

Well, they are rarely fixed by engineering solutions that just try to hide the activity / behavior from view, and ignore the fact that it's a social/political problem.

I can easily come up with 'engineering solutions' to solve social / political problems, but it's usually paired with some sort of social/political action (e.g. engineering cheap weapons to supply a violent revolution).

This. They can help mitigate the damage, and be a force for change, but - to paraphrase Schneier - these systems are robust legally, technically and politically - we need to fight on all fronts to defeat them, and just winning once won't do it, we have to keep fighting back against abusive laws, systems and politicians because they will keep trying until they get whatever they want, at every stage.

We can't magic rogue institutions, politicians and laws away with maths. But it can have an impact on the practical damage they can do.

2014, maybe its about time. You just have to define your problem set correctly, and work with reality rather than an idealised version of it(goes especially for historical precedences). we are lazy, selfish - egocentric, opportunistic animals .. with some natural variations into - what could be considered extremes (altruism / full blown "sociapathism" as an example). Designing public institutions means designing systems those institutions will run on - means getting rid of the non-existent ideals we like to assign to our selves as a species and start working with the sorry-state reality of homo-sapiens-sapiens - hence, engineering challenge ( like designing machinery for a self-managed pig-farm - and yes I chose pigs as an example on purpose )

I disagree. Modern day encryption has smashed a hole in massive social/political issues.

I would go the other way, engineering solutions (i.e Technology) dictate social and political problems.

Vote for pro-EU parties. Or really any party that isn't UKIP.

This would not have happened if the UK had listened to the ECHR or the ECJ.

> Vote for pro-EU parties

This basically pans down to the Greens or the Lib Dems. The former have just one voice, Caroline[0], in the House of Commons. The latter is led by the guy standing alongside the Prime Minister as this "emergency legislation" was announced, and offered his vocal support. In any case, the Lib Dems will also likely be ground in to dust in the coming general election: currently polling at <10%[1], down from about 25-30% prior to the last[2]. So, even if they were successful at moderating Government policy with respect to social liberties, they soon won't matter.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQYutZb2iGk

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_Un...

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7511352/poll-t...

Won't help that much. The existing laws were actually EU laws that a previous UK government had pushed for, essentially using the EU's lack of democratic accountability to make sure voters didn't have a say in it. This happens quite a bit. The only reason they're resorting to this trick is because their usual EU-based one failed.

PPUK needs all the help it can get, the Greens might also be a good choice but be aware of their occasional technophobia.

Follow @tom_watson for more info on this (https://twitter.com/tom_watson).

I know this is Serious Business, but all I can think is -- have these people not SEEN Star Wars?

I think they are aware of the issues and just don't care. Like most things, 90% of people aren't going to be obviously impacted.

It will only be the people they want to give the shaft too. To make matters worse, the majority of those people will actually deserve it which will give them the cover they need. :/

I think comparing David Cameron to the Emperor is a bit of a stretch. ;)

This is the problem. It's less effort for them to keep bringing it back under different names/guises, than it is for the general public to continue fighting it, continue raising enough attention against it, etc.

People are lazy. You can rile them up to get critical mass for an action every now and then, but you can't sustain it forever.

This wouldn't be as big of a problem as it is for both the population who has to stay extremely vigilant (more than they want to) just so they don't pass something quickly and in secret/when no one pays attention (like at holidays), and also the Supreme Court wouldn't be barraged with bad laws from Congress (and these laws don't even reach them for decades sometimes), if US was using a Constitutional Court.

I think having a Constitutional Court that verifies every single bill that passes through Congress and administration, and has final say on whether a bill is going to become law or not, would be a decent solution for an out of control Congress and administration that don't even care if their laws are Constitutional or not anymore.

This is not to "replace" the Supreme Court, or any other Court. this is in addition to them. A Constitutional Court could filter out a lot of the bad bills, before they ever had to reach the Supreme Court for their unconstitutionality. With a Constitutional Court something like the Patriot Act or FAA might've never passed, and we wouldn't have to endure it for 20 years before it even reaches the Supreme Court, to decide its constitutionality.

But what happens if a Constitutional Court allows a "bad bill" to pass anyway, you ask? Well, nothing different than right now. It goes out there, and eventually someone sues over it, and it goes through the same process up to the Supreme Court, if it's that bad. The point of the Constitutional Court wouldn't be to "set a precedent" but to filter out at least 90 percent of bad/unconstitutional bills coming out from Congress. Other than that, everything else will work as normal.

The system is already used in many European countries, and I think it would work well for US, too. Without it a lot of EU countries would probably have a lot worse justice system, since they don't even have the precedent thing, which means that if a lot more bad bills were allowed to go through, they would have a lot more judges split on the decisions, and more unconstitutional laws would be allowed to continue for more years. But the Constitutional Court filters out most of those, so the judges can only be split on a few of the bad ones.

I'm skeptical that adding another layer for the bill to pass through will cause any meaningful improvement, unless there is some clever way to align the incentives of the individuals in the layer more closely with the people.

Still, though, the weak link remains that everyone has to trust these officials will actually uphold the constitution. Unless we can develop something more binding than swearing on a Bible, we're going to keep coming back to this same problem.

That's not to say I don't like the idea of a constitutional court, though. I just think we need to also add some sort of protections against blatantly unconstitutional actions.

Don't you think that would end up like the patent office? Rubber stamps for everyone...

I think a far more effective solution would be to require all laws be version controlled on a publicly available site. Something like github for Congress. No more need to reference Act 737 Paragraph 3 section 2 part H. It's just a diff at that point. It would make it very clear who is proposing changes to what. Combine passage with a code review process so that everyone can see who voted for/against/abstain and why for everything, ever.

The NSA can view the totality of everything we do. Why are we still unable to view the totality of what Congress is up to? 300,000,000 Americans private lives are under total surveillance, while we can't even monitor the supposedly public activity of a measly 600 people.

I fully agree with your way of thinking; this is exactly the approach to these matters I expected to find here on HN.

Precisely the reason why government can never represent the will of the people. For regular people it's hard to project their will onto government, but for rich entities with lobbyists it is much easier. A politician, after elected, has very little incentive to serve his voters and all the incentives in the world to serve those who give him money. Voters, unlike lobbyists, cannot stop paying [tax] money.

> but for rich entities with lobbyists it is much easier

I still don't understand why lobbying - a socially accepted form of corruption - still exists, without being questioned. Even more so as, today, everybody knows that 1% control most of the wealth == lobbying == legislation == our lives.

I agree, except the alternative is worse.

The intent of lobbying is to inform elected officials about issues that they do not necessarily know anything about. The bribery aspect really has more to do with campaign contributions than lobbying, though lobbying can indirectly use those contributions, as well as a lot of societal norms to get its own way (you spend a lot of time discussing issues with someone, even when that someone is biased, and it's a bit rude to vote against them).

Without lobbyists, we have a bunch of uninformed, extremely partisan, mostly white, mostly old, mostly men deciding law, and that's probably even worse.

I don't know the fix; certainly, limiting the amount of lobbying corporations can do is likely part of it, but I would not want to also limit the ability of the ACLU and EFF from being able to talk to Congress, either.

I personally think that removing the "burden" of voting on so many issues from congress and giving it directly to the people through online voting would be a potential solution.

Verification of votes would be very possible. If it did get hacked then fix the security hole, wipe the system, and vote again.

It would never happen because of self-interest in congress and they'd argue "but normal citizens are too dumb to decide for themselves".

While we're at it why don't we fix campaigning too? Limit how much politicians can get from corporations. What are we the Mafia?

The road to robust democracy is not paved with rules.

People need to pay more attention to what the government is doing, pretty much all the time, and at every level of government. It would also be nice if people were a little more willing to consider that permission from 51% is still some pretty shitty permission.

You're tackling the problem from the wrong end. If you make lobbying illegal, it'd still exist. The problem is not that corporations want to take advantage of the power government has - however moral, they still have to lobby or their competitor will. The problem is that corporations have an opportunity to lobby at all. That is, the real problem is the existence of government.

The UK is also passing "emergency" data retention legislation just before Parliament closes for summer and before the data is deleted. http://dataretentionandinvestigatorypowersbill.uk

I just checked my MP on Twitter. So far one person has tweeted to her about it. It makes me think the levels of apathy are just too high here for anybody to make a difference.

Well, I contacted my MP. I'm not holding my breath with this voting record:

* Voted very strongly against paying higher benefits over longer periods for those unable to work due to illness or disability

* Voted very strongly for increasing the rate of VAT

* Voted very strongly against raising welfare benefits at least in line with prices

* Voted very strongly for reducing central government funding of local government

* Voted a mixture of for and against a wholly elected House of Lords

The infographic mentions that "Corporate lobbyists have spent $605 million to get this legislation passed".

These pages show which corporations are supporting this (links towards the bottom):

http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/113-hr-624/1202831/tota...

Hey California, why is Feinstein still in office?

SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, CISPA v2, now CISA.

because voting her out would likely require voting in a republican, which doesn't seem overly likely against an incumbent.

This makes sense, depressing, apathy-inducing sense.

The infographic around half way down the page is really well put together.

The problem is that for people living outside the US, we already have the right side of the infographic. All our data is vacuumed in and used with impunity and nobody gives a damn whether we want it or not. Most of the discussion so far has been about the circumstances and illegality of spying after US citizens. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is left watching like second or third class human beings who can't have _any_ realistic expectations with regard to having privacy of their data used by US companies (which dominate the market due to several reasons)

"Places online where you can expect privacy: Facebook"

I'd rather be spied upon by NSA any day over Facebook. Atleast then I know how my information is being used. But oh right, NSA doesn't have a website where you can show off your socio economic status.

Between having my hand blown off and sawed off, I'd prefer neither.

> Atleast then I know how my information is being used.

Facebook's never imprisoned or tortured anyone that I'm aware of. Maybe that'll be in a future rollout.

Yup, just enabled those that do. Good for them. Keeping their hands clean.

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