Steve Watson
GCN Live.com
April 23, 2012
“Big Brother writ” will allow feds to use corporate resources for “spying on the American people”.
In the week that lawmakers will vote on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CIPSA), Presidential candidate Ron Paul has slammed the legislation in an effort to raise public awareness of the dangers the bill poses to the free and open internet.
“CISPA is essentially an Internet monitoring bill that permits both the federal government and private companies to view your private online communications with no judicial oversight, provided, of course, that they do so in the name of cyber security,” Paul notes in his weekly Texas Straight Talk address.
“The bill is very broadly written and allows the Department of Homeland Security to obtain large swabs of personal information contained in your email or other online communications,” Paul urges.
“It also allows email and other private information found online to be used for purposes far beyond any reasonable definition of fighting cyber terrorism.”
Both the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) have noted that CISPA effectively legislates for monitoring and collecting online communications without the knowledge of the parties concerned and funneling them directly to the National Security Agency or the DOD’s Cybercommand.
In the past few days, the bill has attracted several new sponsors, bringing the number of CISPA co-sponsors to 112 members of Congress, up from 106 at the end of last month.
While the legislation has undergone some revision in the past few weeks, the core of the bill remains the same, prompting even the White House to issue a warning on the privacy implications for Americans.
“We should never underestimate the federal government’s insatiable desire to control the Internet,” Ron Paul notes.
“CISPA represents an alarming form of corporatism as it further intertwines governments with companies like Google and Facebook,” continues the congressman. “It permits them to hand over your private communications to government officials without a warrant, circumventing the well-known established federal laws like the Wiretap Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.”
“It also grants them broad immunity from lawsuits for doing so, leaving you for without recourse for invasion of privacy,” he adds.
Paul calls a “Big Brother writ” that cuts into “the resources of the private industry to work for the nefarious purpose of spying on the American people.”
“We can only hope the American people will respond to CISPA as they did with SOPA back in January,” concludes the congressman.
Listen to Ron Paul’s important update below:
This week will see up to four pieces of cybersecurity legislation reviewed in Congress, leading sections of the media to dub it “Cyber week”.
Aside from CISPA, the other bills up for review include the DATA Act sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa, the Cybersecurity Enhancement Act sponsored by Rep. Michael McCaul’s (R-Texas), and a computer technology research and development bill from Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Texas).
Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.
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WHATEVER!!!! Really?!?!? It’s people like this, and bills like this that make me give up on all things human! Yeah, really does.
Ok end of rant.
It just that this kinda thing ticks me off not the bill so much, (Yeah it is bad, and I am not saying it should be passed) but the fact that people don’t know or don’t recall that the Internet is “no mans land”. From that point of view it does not matter, at all if this bill lives or dies, the Internet is “no mans land”.
If people are worried about a 3rd party seeing what data goes where as pointed out “…Internet monitoring bill that permits both the federal government and private companies to view your private online communications…” How about trying encryption?? It’s only been used for how long? Yeah that is right, a long time. Sure the digital tools for them have are somewhat new but they work.
Yeah Yeah Yeah I hear it, “It adds a step when I want to send blah blah blah”, but so does locking your doors to your house when you leave, you morons.
Try http://www.openssl.org.
The OpenSSL Project is a collaborative effort to develop a robust, commercial-grade, full-featured, and Open Source toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) protocols as well as a full-strength general purpose cryptography library.
Email try GnuPG http://www.gnupg.org/
GnuPG allows to encrypt and sign your data and communication, features a versatile key management system as well as access modules for all kinds of public key directories.
There are always a tool beat this stuff. Why people get all up and arms over this makes me go… “Oh please Mr. meteor. GET HERE FASTER!!!”