This past winter, hundreds of thousands of people banded together to strike down the Stop Online Piracy Act before it became law. It was beautiful: young people getting involved in politics, if only to protect their God-given right to download the latest episode of "Mad Men" and repost clips of their favorite shows. However, it seems unlikely that the Internet's masses would have been victorious in this case without the assistance of the technology industry giants like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter who lobbied, purchased full-page ads in The New York Times and blacked out their websites in protest.
Now a new bill has emerged, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, that has the potential to violate our rights and privacy in perhaps a more sinister way. But this time, the powers that be in the tech world have sided with Washington. Exactly why they've done so is a lesson in cynicism. And business. Sadly, without them, we may not win.
CISPA is a proposed amendment to the National Security Act of 1947 that seeks to make it easier for the government to get information from internet service providers in cases of perceived threats against national security. The problem with the bill is in its vagueness. According to the text of the bill, the law would allow the full seizure of a large segment of an internet provider's user data if there is any evidence of "efforts to degrade, disrupt or destroy" or of the "theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property or personally identifiable information." Worse, government agencies can search this user data for personal information unrelated to the original seizure all without a warrant. This is good in the case of foreign cyber attacks aimed at civilian defense contractors but bad for the fourth amendment.
In response to significant opposition from the online community, lawmakers have proposed several amendments to the bill, to be voted on later this month. Amendments include making the government liable to lawsuits filed against its seizures. Another saddles accountability with the civilian Department of Homeland Security, whereas the current bill designates the more secretive, military National Security Agency as the organization to receive and act upon the information. However, vague terms like "national security" and "cyber threats" remain undefined, and we still have the tricky problem of the government being allowed access to private, identifiable information without warrants or much oversight.
Technology companies like Facebook and Microsoft have come out in support of the new bill, which essentially allows for the same violations of civil rights and privacy as SOPA. So why? With SOPA, the legislation put the burden all on the tech companies, holding them liable for infringements, a move that would indeed have hindered growth, profits and innovation. In CISPA's case, however, the government regulates user content instead, lifting the heavy burden of liability from the shoulders of tech companies. No longer can these companies be sued for supplying the government with user data. No longer do they have to pay the price in dollars or negative publicity. They'll say, "a law's a law" no one will be able to blame them for following it. As one blogger put it, "Supporting CISPA is in these companies' interest. Supporting SOPA/PIPA was not." Sucks for us.
The following months will be an interesting time for the Internet and will serve as a kind of democratic litmus test to determine whether or not the self-congratulations from SOPA and other internet campaigns have been deserved. We will see if the increasingly not-so-anonymous masses can indeed rise up to combat legislation that violates their rights and the privacy they hold so dear.
I would call on tech companies to reconsider their roots and think about what CISPA could mean to the online world they helped create. I would plead for industry leaders like Google, Microsoft and Facebook to pressure Congress to work with them to create a bill that can simultaneously keep our nation safer while protecting the principles on which it was founded: to tell them "doing no evil" does not mean doing nothing at all. But that would be silly, I guess; I'm sure they don't pay much attention to the pleas of a single college student. Instead, I'll sit here, sign that petition, write this article and pray to the Gods my voice our voice still matters.
