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Congress is rushing toward a vote on CISA, the worst spying bill yet. CISA would grant sweeping legal immunity to giant companies like Facebook and Google, allowing them to do almost anything they want with your data. In exchange, they’ll share even more of your personal information with the government, all in the name of “cybersecurity.” CISA won’t stop hackers — Congress is stuck in 1984 and doesn’t understand modern technology. So this week we’re sending them thousands of faxes — technology that is hopefully old enough for them to understand.
The problem is, the bill they’re laser-focused on is misguided, wouldn’t protect us — and is a huge gift to companies wanting legal cover if and when they choose to violate Americans’ privacy rights.
In March, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted 14–1 in favor of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA). The bill, like its infamous predecessor CISPA, would allow companies to share vast amounts of users’ private and personally identifiable data with the government. That information would go straight to the Department of Homeland Security and then on to the NSA.
If CISA passes, companies would be permitted to monitor and then report to the government on vaguely defined “cyber-threat indicators” — a term so broad that it covers actual threats hackers pose to computer systems but also sweeps in information on crimes like carjacking and burglaries. Those are serious offenses to be sure, but they have nothing to do with cybersecurity.
While current law allows companies to monitor their own systems for cyber threats, CISA would take this to the next level. The bill would allow companies that hold huge swaths of our personal data — like health insurers and credit-card companies — to monitor and report online activity “notwithstanding any other provision of law.”
This means that CISA would undermine the strong protections embedded in laws like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 and the Privacy Act of 1964 — laws designed to keep the government from spying on our communications.
While posing a serious threat to our privacy online, CISA wouldn’t even guard well against cyber attacks. The bill offers a bad trade-off, to put it mildly.
Well that was quick … late Monday the first lawsuits against the FCC’s new Net Neutrality rules were filed.
The flashpoints for activism are the many failures of the existing media system. Whether it’s the silencing of dissenting views, the attacks on online privacy, the throttling of Internet access or the monopolization of choice, the problems are often rooted in bad public policy.
The only way we’re going to win back Net Neutrality is if FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler finds the courage to do the right thing. And a message from Google’s Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg carries a lot of weight in Washington.
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What do an environmental group in Ohio, a small military radio program, and a network of rural hospitals in Texas all have in common? They appear on a list of coalition members for a group pressuring the government to abandon net neutrality—rules to prevent broadband providers from creating Internet fast and slow lanes—but claim they did not intend to sign up for any such advocacy.
Read more here.
Tell Congress: Keep the Internet WEIRD — and SAVE NET NEUTRALITY
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