So here is my unpopular opinion that no one ever likes to hear about this bill. I know Reddit, forum communities, and the internet in general likes to flip their shit over any bill that has the word "internet" in it, but I don't see this one as that bad. This bill is not SOPA or PIPA. I'm fine with the bill at this point, before they removed that I didn't like that pork attached to it. This bill was not originally about that at all. I don't think it's intent is to spy on personal people surfing, or come after sites like Hubski. Besides, they can and already do those things under other bills, and if they wanted information from Hubski they could already subpoena MK for it. Hell, even 4chan complies and works with the government authorities when it comes to warrants and searches. Already happens all the time, nothing to freak out about there. I work in IT, specifically web infrastructure for a financial company that gets hacking attempts by China, Russia, and all kinds of Eastern Bloc IPs on a weekly basis. It's becoming quite the problem for companies world wide, not just America. The US is quickly realizing that it's stake in the global market is at risk of being degraded or stolen by other nations who will duplicate our products/services. There are some advantages to being able to "share notes" and look into trends. This bill mostly revolves around hardening networks for both government and private corporations to help keep those things secure. The "sharing government intelligence with private sector entities" portion of this bill is mostly what I'm supportive of. That helps companies like mine. It also has a bunch of stuff related to missing children, pedophiles, child porn, and that kind of thing. Cyber crime is bigger than most people think and only getting worse, and no we aren't talking about Anonymous or Lulzsec... those groups are clown-shoes. We are talking about government sponsored and organized cyber-crime from very sophisticated nations targeting our infrastructure, stealing our information, and establishing a dominance on the net. There is a certain "scary element" to what is going on out there. A couple years back, when Google pulled it's business out of China, they wrote a very public memo to the worlds IT staff about how they were fully aware of China's government sponsored and targeted attacks on international IT infrastructure. To degrade, to steal, and to clone. And again, it's not just China, but even Google stressed that it felt a need for US corporations to start sharing security/threat information to help harden our resources. Google hinted at it in this memo they releases when the pulled out of the country... http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china... Granted, any bill could be used maliciously by the government, there is no denying that, but there is nothing inherently malicious about this bill, and I think the "internet outrage" over it is misinformed and misdirected at best. The government already has carte blanche with the patriot act bills when it comes to searching against private citizens. Again, this isn't SOPA, and has little to do with copyrighted material or the government coming for your pirated music collection. It's a national security bill, and personally I see no harm in it. I personally don't buy into all the "OMG THEY ARE TAKING AWAY OUR INTERNET" hysteria that comes from communities like Reddit and the like. They are just looking for something new to get outraged over and exercise their love of slacktivism for. It won't affect anything they do on the internet. That's my two cents. The TL;DR is I don't find this bill threatening to the freedom of the internet or it's content. It's mostly for putting some national security rhetoric onto paper.Intellectual property theft was initially listed in the bill as a possible cause for sharing Web traffic information with the government, though it was removed in subsequent drafts.
CISPA is mainly a threat to privacy. I'm all for companies being able to share cyber-attack information effectively, but it must be done in a way that protects users' privacy. I don't want my entire account information to be sent to the government and any number of private organizations just because Google was hacked.
from an IT standpoint I don't know why anyone would need that information for what this bill describes. Nor did I see that verbiage in there. There's a big difference between network infrastructure security, and handing over data. For instance my company handles every mortgage in the country, we've never handed a single loan over and never will, but we've handed over and shared information about our security, setup, and hardening of our web infrastructure environments with government sources. They have no interest in our data, only how we're protecting and securing said data. They are interested in our logs mostly, as we report all of these attacks to the government. They have no use for or interest in getting access to our encrypted data, my email account, nor my Hubski login info. It would serve them no purpose. Again, any bill can be malicious, and they can already subpoena your providers for that info if they needed it anyway under a bunch of more malicious legislature like the Patriot Act.I don't want my entire account information to be sent to the government and any number of private organizations
I don't know, that's a good question. Put them all on a level playing field and protect them from civil suits? I honestly could only guess at that part, but that is a good question you bring up.
Well done. Are you by chance aware of any counter-attacks U.S. government or companies are conducting against Chinese or other attackers? I think it's warranted considering how much they try to steal and destroy on our end of it.
No, not aware of anything, I'm sure there's something going on though. They wouldn't publish that information. There are numerous links to the US government hacking Iran though and giving them some pretty crazy-state-of-the-art viruses though.
Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to enlighten us on this!