Facebook supports CISPA

No dude, you've got it all wrong. It's to fight porn piracy and it is totally excellent.

Google actually made a few local newspapers over here with their anti-CISPA stance (saying that Facebook is supporting a bill that would destroy the internet as we know it).

1. Widespread Employee Monitoring. The CISPA bill states that any business can "use cybersecurity systems to identify and obtain cyber threat information to protect [its] rights and property"--which privacy watchers said will include email or Facebook message contents--while having immunity from prosecution or lawsuits under any other law. According to the EFF, that provision would subvert privacy protections offered by existing wiretapping laws and electronic privacy communications laws, allowing companies to "bypass all existing laws, as long as they claim a vague 'cybersecurity' purpose," without threat of reprisal.

2. No Information-Sharing Restrictions. Another criticism of CISPA is that, as worded, it doesn't restrict the reasons for which information may be gathered. "It lacks meaningful use restrictions--it should be made clear that information shared for cybersecurity should be used for cybersecurity purposes, not unrelated national security purposes or criminal investigations," said CDT senior counsel Greg Nojeim in a statement.

3. Information May Be Shared With NSA. Under CISPA, companies could voluntarily share any communications they like with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). "After collecting your communications, companies can then voluntarily hand them over to the government with no warrant or judicial oversight whatsoever as long is the communications have what the companies interpret to be 'cyber threat information' in them," said the EFF. DHS would also then be free to share the information with other government agencies, including the National Security Agency, over which there's little oversight, according to civil rights groups.


4. Bill May Encourage Broad Surveillance. As with SOPA and PIPA, many privacy watchers aren't lobbying for no legislation. Rather, privacy groups say that they want more carefully constructed bills, which take into account existing civil liberties, and which monitor government access to people's personal communications. "We need cybersecurity legislation, not surveillance legislation," said CDT President Leslie Harris, in a statement criticizing CISPA.

5. CISPA Alternatives Do Exist. Better alternatives to CISPA may already exist, according to privacy groups. For example, the CDT is backing a different cybersecurity bill, known as the PRECISE Act, which was written by Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.). According to the CDT, that bill "has information-sharing language that offers a better alternative to CISPA, balancing cybersecurity, industry, and civil liberties concerns." Might CISPA succeed where SOPA and PIPA failed? Last week, members of the hacktivist group Anonymous launched a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Boeing, as well as the trade associations TechAmerica and USTelecom, all of which have publicly backed CISPA.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/...vacy/232900418

http://www.informationweek.com/news/...vacy/232900418

http://rt.com/usa/news/cispa-bill-sopa-internet-175/