http://www.techwatch.co.uk/2012/04/09/c ... t-freedom/CISPA security bill threatens net freedomSo SOPA got swept under the carpet in the US, now a new acronym bearing threat has emerged
Adam Smith
April 9, 2012
We’re all likely familiar with SOPA, the anti-piracy legislation pushed by the US film, music and software industries, which eventually died in the face of massive protests (featuring various high-profile measures such as Wikipedia’s one day blackout).
Now there’s a new threat to internet freedom on the American legislative horizon, and its name is CISPA or the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act.
What this aims to do, on the face of it, is allow companies and the government to share data in the interests of national security, to protect against possible terrorist and other such actions.
However, the bill is so scarily wide ranging and non-specific, it pretty much gives the US government the power to sidestep existing privacy safeguards and pretty much do what they want in terms of monitoring online communication and activity. Or indeed potentially censoring it.
This is certainly a worrying development, and is now provoking the same sort of backlash that SOPA did among concerned citizens of the internet. An Avaaz.org petition has now clocked up over half a million signatures protesting against CISPA.
...
