CISPA...

The Stop Online Piracy Act as well as the Protect Intellectual Property Act, SOPA and PIPA, were all the rage over the past few months. These bills were trying to be passed through congress. These two bills and the legislation behind them caused a pandemic of publicity and outrage. There were huge companies behind the support of denying the bill. Google petitions that even I took part in.

Although the bills were unsuccessful in congress, there is another bill in the works that a lot of people don't realize is even worse. It's called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, CISPA for short.

The Reason why this bill is even worse than SOPA or PIPA is the vague wording in the bill.

Theft of misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property or personally identifiable material.

This is far too broad of a statement! Protecting from the 'misappropriation'? of intellectual property? So basically if your web site challenges an idea, like Face-book or the government for example and all of the sudden you are there competition, they can take legal action against you and your website. The wording of the bill is vague enough to say that if you are a large corporation, you're on the government's side and are 'protected' under the bill. It is a violation of first amendment rights to freedom of speech, press, and religion.

The difference beteween CISPA and the other bills is that the same big corporations and companies that were against SOPA and PIPA are now in favor of CISPA. The reason for this is explained in this article on PCWorld.com, of course several other sources have been trying to raise awareness on CISPA.

The “Broader information sharing between business and government” is basically a new revenue stream for big information gathering companies like Google and Facebook. This unhindered, and government supported invasion of all privacy is scary to me. Where do we draw the line?  It's all a big rat race for these companies and the money is the driving force for the violation of all of our civil rights, even if it does happen to be on the internet.