A new bill is making its way through congress – CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which is pretty much SOPA in different shoes. It’s another attempt to give copyright enforces carte blanche to spy on internet users and censor online content without just cause. Which is sort of bad.
Particularly worrying is the fact that the CISPA bill is using different language to SOPA – not only to hide how similar the two are, but to give more ambiguous power to copyright enforcers if enacted. EFF has a thorough analysis of the bill’s language over here:
The broad language around what constitutes a cybersecurity threat leaves the door wide open for abuse. For example, the bill defines “cyber threat intelligence” and “cybersecurity purpose” to include “theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information.”
Yes, intellectual property. It’s a little piece of SOPA wrapped up in a bill that’s supposedly designed to facilitate detection of and defense against cybersecurity threats. The language is so vague that an ISP could use it to monitor communications of subscribers for potential infringement of intellectual property. An ISP could even interpret this bill as allowing them to block accounts believed to be infringing, block access to websites like The Pirate Bay believed to carry infringing content, or take other measures provided they claimed it was motivated by cybersecurity concerns.
DemandProgress, one of the groups pivotal in the shutting-down of of SOPA, has a petition up against CISPA over here.
[Source: EFF]
