10 ms·

One of the biggest (and most frustrating) problems with the legislative process is that the people who really want this to go through KNOW that we - "the masses

• ori_b 14y ago
  Go on the offensive. Instead of just fighting to kill legislation like CISPA, lobby for legislation that will guarantee the freedom of the internet. That will unequivocally protect people's liberties on (and off) the internet.
  • sp332 14y ago
    Getting such a law passed does nothing to prevent a future law from saying the opposite.
    • drcube 14y ago
      Unless you amend the Constitution. Good luck! EDIT: Another option is for the courts to decide that freedom was guaranteed in the Constitution all along. But courts are unpredictable so again, good luck!
      • stonemetal 14y ago
        Amendment 21(repeal of prohibition), Nothing is forever.
    • AnthonyMouse 14y ago
      >Getting such a law passed does nothing to prevent a future law from saying the opposite. What it does is make the proposal for the future law look like a much larger departure from the status quo, which makes it a harder sell. Furthermore, members of Congress don't like to change their positions for a number of reasons relating to both ego and what it allows election opponents to put in political advertisements, so if you can get them on record supporting your cause then you make them less likely to go against you in the future.
  • dubfan 14y ago
    The special interests behind legislation like CISPA have professional lobbyists and millions of dollars to pay them. If you're a private citizen and want a law passed at the federal level, you need to have a cute and young white child who died due to something your law legislates against. Otherwise you don't stand a chance of being heard.
    • likpok 14y ago
      So start soliciting donations and hire your own professional lobbyist. The amount of whining about how the political process is broken because it actually takes work to influence legislation is a little ridiculous.
      • ori_b 14y ago
        Better: Start forming a coalition of private individuals and companies, and use that group to hire lobbyists. The game is broken, but you can't win if you refuse to play.
        • mindslight 14y ago
          You can certainly enjoy your life a lot more if you take your ball, go home, and play with your computer. Who knows, computers may even turn out to be popular in a decade's time.
          • nitrogen 14y ago
            I've come to the conclusion that mainstreaming a technology results in the technology conforming to the mainstream, rather than the mainstream adopting the interests of the early adopters of the technology.
            • rayiner 14y ago
              Which is precisely how it should be. Technology is for the use and convenience of the masses--it's not a vector for political minorities to spread their ideological viewpoints. My mom doesn't need to listen to Vint Cerf's politics to use the TCP/IP to trade pictures of my kid with my wife's mom.
• unix-dude 14y ago
  I really don't think these kinds of bills will end until there is an amendment passed expressly guarenteeing rights relating to internet (or, perhaps more broadly, network) freedom. In fact, I doubt even that will stop these kinds of laws from being introduced. However, it will give a firm and easy foothold to dismissing them. Similarly, it will become that much easier to retroactively have them removed if they violate an amendment. The exact text of this kind of amendment would be difficult to craft, frankly, I'm not a lawyer, I have no idea where or how to start crafting this. However, I do fully believe this is the ultimate winning endgame for this kind of legislation. We need a "legal hacker" a la Richard Stallman to craft something like this.
  • aptwebapps 14y ago
    You need a heck of a lot more than a legal hacker to get a Constitutional Amendment passed.
    • unix-dude 14y ago
      Step one is to get a good, versatile amendment written. For that, you need a "legal hacker". Step 2 is getting support, which probably would not be particularly difficult. Step 3 is actually going through process, and is probably the most difficult step.
• daten 14y ago
  I worry that most of the opposition to this bill is based on FUD that EFF is spreading. Having experience actually working in the security industry and knowing the limitations that this bill is trying to address, the ability of the government and private sector to work together to keep malicious groups out of their networks, I recognize the necessity and intentions of this bill. This isn't about spying on Americans. This isn't SOPA with a new name. This isn't about stopping piracy or spying on your facebook profile. This bill is about letting government agencies share intelligence on network threats with private companies so those companies can protect their customers information. None of the agencies or companies involved want to share any private information about their citizens or customers. There are lots of lawyers involved in the process to ensure that doesn't happen. I wonder if some of that exhaustion is also what leads people to not read the bill or understand the context and just assume it's another anti-piracy bill.
  • gojomo 14y ago
    What are the current barriers to agencies sharing intelligence with private companies? Can you give an anonymized/abstract example, where the FBI/etc might have actionable info about a 'cyber threat', and under current law can't pick up the phone or send an email warning private companies?
    • snowwrestler 14y ago
      Primarily the barrier from government to company was that much of the valuable info was classified. The Obama executive order on cybersecurity created a mechanism to bypass this barrier that is similar to what was in CISPA. So why pass CISPA now? To remove the barrier in the other direction, from company to government. Right now there are interpretations of certain federal laws that say that companies cannot share threat data with the government. In addition, public companies fear shareholder lawsuits if they were to disclose publicly that they have been hacked. In an ideal world you would have a virtuous cycle, where one company stops a threat, sends the critical threat info the government, which shares it with every other company--all basically in real time. That would prevent, or at least reduce, the issue now where one exploit works again and again and again at different companies. Whether it is possible to do this while adequately protecting privacy is the issue. I'm not a lawyer but it seems to me like it should be doable if the language in the bill is done right.
• snowwrestler 14y ago
  It's not the reality; lines can and are held. For example, drilling in ANWR has been proposed for decades and it still isn't happening, because the organizations who fight are smart about when they fire up their troops. In addition, environmental type people are not reflexively opposed to/afraid of the federal government, so they are willing to educate themselves about the process and the issue. They learn to distinguish between issues, and when a threat is real vs. perceived. In comparison the Internet enthusiast community seems to largely persist in the fantasy that the government should not (or cannot) have a role in the regulation of the Internet. Thus when issues do come up, they are ignorant and reactive. And they are eager for issues to go away so that they can go back to "normal" i.e. ignoring the government.
• pasbesoin 14y ago
  This is part of why I've decided to no longer politically support (vote for, nor contribute to) "the best of a bad lot". Perhaps I'll be "throwing my vote away". Nonetheless, next time around, I'll be choosing from amongst the other choices. For the Federal elections, it's early enough in the cycle that if people start doing this en masse, it might have some real influence.
  • AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    I keep telling people this, because it can't be emphasized enough: The reason your choice in the general election is between a giant douche and a turd sandwich is that those are the people who win the primaries. If you want to change that, vote in the primaries.
• tptacek 14y ago
  You are especially likely to become numb to calls to arms when they are in fact cries of "wolf". SOPA was a genuinely invasive bill and a clear power grab by the content industry. It created a new special second-class "tainted" designation for content sites that refused to play ball with rightsholders and gave rightsholders new means to prosecute their rights outside of civil courts. It was understandable and --- even though I'm a supporter of copyright in general --- commendable that organized opposition to SOPA killed that bill outright. CISPA is nothing like SOPA. To begin with, CISPA has none of the same objectives of SOPA. It isn't about the content industry at all. In fact, when early opposition to CISPA by organizations like EFF started catching on, its sponsors scrubbed the bill of language that could have been read (in a stretch) as protecting rightsholders. CISPA is about online security attacks, not about piracy. Next, CISPA isn't invasive. SOPA threatened to create a kangaroo court system of copyright-noncompliant sites that the content industry could starve by banning commercial transactions with them. CISPA is an opt-i bill; the USG cannot compel any organization to cooperate with any USG agency, but instead creates a facility that companies can use if they need to share attack information but don't want to spend $100,000 in ECPA-interpreting legal review each time they do it. In fact, CISPA in practice probably has more to do with information moving FROM the USG TO private companies. The USG spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year monitoring its networks (which together constitute the largest IT organization in the world). It is true that the largest IT org in the world happens to be a shitty IT shop, but it has nevertheless built up about a decade of experience tracking malware and botnets and DOS attack information; when Blaster broke out, the experience of the Naval Marine Corp Intranet getting overrun by it was some of the first shared among ISPs. All sorts of random rules prevent USG IT shops from running any kind of central clearinghouse of attack information, and still more rules prevent any of that information from being published. I don't particularly like CISPA. It obviously sounds like I do, but that's because the uninformed paranoia about CISPA is so virulent that any measured take on the bill sounds like cheerleading. I don't care whether CISPA passes or doesn't pass. But it drives me a little bananas to see how easily the ostensibly curious and well-informed people on HN are bamboozled by identity politics on issues like this. It's a tiny bill, as bills go. Just go read it.
  • lawnchair_larry 14y ago
    If you truly don't understand why many are opposed to it, you should read the EFF FAQ page. It doesn't matter what the objectives are, or whether or not the intention is to protect rights holders. It matters what the law actually allows as written. That's what we take issue with. And yes, I have read the entire thing.