CISPA Passes US House, Stalling in Senate

While the nation's attention has been on the Boston bombers and questions about their links to Islamic terrorism, computer users faced some other worries. On Thursday April 18th, the CISPA Bill passed the US House of Representatives by a vote of 288-127.

CISPA, officially named the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, was introduced supposedly as to help the government "investigate cyber threats and ensure the security of networks against cyberattacks." But it has been heavily criticized for being a threat to the public's right to privacy. This includes permitting authorities to search databases without warrants, and Internet service providers would be banned from making "legally binding" promises to protect users' privacy.

Fortunately for privacy activists, the bill's future is iffy, at least for the short term. The Senate has been preoccupied with other issues such as immigration and the right to buy firearms. The White House has also threatened to veto the bill if concerns about privacy issues were unanswered, "Citizens have a right to know that corporations will be held accountable, and not granted immunity, for failing to safeguard personal information adequately … " This is a similar course to what happened in 2012, and the bill was never taken up by the Senate that year.


Sources: ABC News (Chicago) , CNet, Wikipedia

Bixyl Shuftan

SL Club Alliance Discusses Reports of ISPs to Police Music Downloads This Month

Earlier this year, the SOPA and CISPA bills in Congress raised fears about Internet censorship and the loss of privacy. In a recent meeting of the FCA (Furry Club Alliance), a group of music clubs in Second Life, some DJs and club staff brought up some other Internet news from earlier this year. A number of Internet Service Providers were set to begin policing downloads on July 1st.

An article on Cnet.com in March discussed about an agreement between several ISPs and RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, to adopt policies to discourage illegal music and software downloads last year. The White House was also involved in the deal. "During a panel discussion before a gathering of US publishers here today (March 14)" RIAA's CEO stated most of the ISPs in the program were set to "begin implementing the program by July 1st."

The program has been called "graduated response." Those suspected of illegal downloading will receive one or two notices. If the downloads do not stop, confirmation notices are sent, and "the accused customers will also be informed of the risks they incur if they don't stop pirating material." Further flags for illegal downloads can bring on a list of penalties, or "mitigation measures" as RIAA calls them, such as slowing down the ISP's customer's Internet connection speed, or web access suspended.

The issues with the plan were brought up in a dottech article, such as false accusations, punishing multiple users on a network when only one is downloading questionable material, and privacy concerns, "What gives the entertainment industry of America the right to bypass these basic American rights?" On the plus side, "none of the ISPs have agreed to permanently shutdown subscribers." Plus "there are bound to be services and software that crop up to beat the system, for those that are really bothered by this." Forbes.com listed Apple as having patented a technique to fool trackers.

The people at the FCA meeting talked about the bill, "so basically the government is trying to screw us again, does that sum it up?" Adrianna Aeghin advised calm, "No ISP is going to analyze all the datastreams in use at any one time, EVEN if they're participating, which I think most won't. So they're mostly only going to look at people they have a reason to expect. … I really don't think this is going to be a problem for SL DJs. … Too many people are in a blind panic over this." One DJ at the begining had wondered if she would have to stop playing music in Second Life. But as the discussion went on, she felt more assured.

The group decided to take a wait and see stance, keeping an eye on the news to see if anyone was going after users for downloading music, and not jumping to conclusions over any rumors and whispers.

In other news, two of the men in Washington who helped defeat SOPA, one Democrat, one Republican, spoke out last month, calling for some form of Internet "Bill of Rights."

Sources: cnet.com, dottech.org

Bixyl Shuftan

CISPA Internet Bill Passed in US House

According to Forbes.com, the CISPA Internet bill, which sparked privacy worries among numerous Internet freedom advocates, was passed in Washington. "In an earlier-than-expected vote Thursday evening, the House of Representatives voted 248 to 168 in favor of the bill."

According to writer Andy Greenman, Trevor Timm, a lawyer and activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, felt, "the House’s early vote on CISPA as an attempt by its author, representative Mike Rogers, to squeeze the bill through before its opposition grew any stronger." The bill was also amended before passage, "the House voted to amend the bill to actually allow even more types of private sector information to be shared with government agencies, not merely in matters of cybersecurity or national security, but in the investigation of vaguely defined cybersecurity 'crimes,' 'protection of individuals from the danger of death or serious bodily harm,' and cases that involve the protection of minors from exploitation." It was a move that raised further concerns from opponents. Techdirt.com's Leigh Beadon called it "an absolutely terrible change."

"Somehow, incredibly, this was described as limiting CISPA, but it accomplishes the exact opposite," Beadon wrote, "CISPA is now a completely unsupportable bill that rewrites (and effectively eliminates) all privacy laws for any situation that involves a computer. Far from the defense against malevolent foreign entities that the bill was described as by its authors, it is now an explicit attack on the freedoms of every American."

The bill still has to be passed in the Senate before heading to the White House, which has come out against it recently. Timm saw hope it would be beaten, "We’ve seen an explosion of a variety of groups and congressmen coming out against the bill,” he says. “As the Senate debates this, it’s good that privacy and civil liberties will be front and center.”

Sources: Forbes.com, Techdirt.com

Bixyl Shuftan

SOPA Act Two? CISPA to be Decided in US House as Soon as Today

Remember the mess over SOPA in December and January? This proposed law had the potential for becoming "The Great Firewall of America," possibly meaning the end of favorite places online such as Youtube, Facebook, and Second Life. Despite a Congress seemingly poised to approve it, opposition to it and it's sister bill PIPA grew in numbers. The backers of SOPA eventually shelved it from a vote, and the opponents had seemingly won.

However, a new bill, H.R. 3523,  has made it through committee: the "Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act," or CISPA. Intended to "allow the voluntary sharing of attack and threat information between the U.S. government and security cleared technology and manufacturing companies to ensure the security of networks against patterns of attack," the bill "has been criticized by advocates of Internet privacy and neutrality, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation … because they feel it contains too few limits on how and when the government may monitor private information when it might become collaterally entangled in the process of passing threat information, and too few safeguards with respect to how the data may be used; they fear that such new powers may be used to find and punish file sharers and copyright infringers rather than the stated foreign spies or hackers."

An article in Forbes.com describes opposition to the bill as mounting, "On Monday, a group of more than fifty professors, entrepreneurs and information security professionals published an open letter to Congress calling on lawmakers to oppose CISPA and other overbroad cybersecurity bills like the SECURE IT Act … CISPA has a very different focus from SOPA and PIPA, the much-loathed antipiracy bills killed by a similar groundswell of Internet anger in February. Whereas SOPA and PIPA raised fears of censorship, CISPA’s vague data-sharing statutes are largely seen as a threat to privacy, although some are also interpreting the bill as allowing site blocking. And whereas SOPA pitted Silicon Valley against Hollywood, CISPA seems to have the support of many technology and Web-based companies, including Facebook, Microsoft, Symantec, and IBM."

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, spoke last week the bill "is threatening the rights of people in America, and effectively rights everywhere." Senator Ron Paul spoke out against the bill, saying it would make "government spies of Facebook and Google." Eighteen House Representatives signed a letter opposing the bill, at least in its current form. The White House has also come out against CISPA. Avaaz.org has a petition against the bill with three-quarters of a million signatures, with the goal of making it a million. Reddit has a number of "anti-CISPA discussions."

CISPA is expected to be voted on in the House of Represenatives today.


Sources: Wikipedia, Forbes.com, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Avaaz.org, Reddit,

Bixyl Shuftan