Man, this is some terrible reporting. Here's the bill: http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/files/serve/?File_id=08de1c1b-446b-478c-84a8-0c3f359632

Man, this is some terrible reporting. Here's the bill: http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/files/serve/?File_id=08de1c1b-446b-478c-84a8-0c3f35963216 http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/files/serve... It's actually called the "Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act", not the "Cybersecurity Information Protection Act" (the latter makes googling sufficiently hard). The definition in question states: > (7) CYBERSECURITY THREAT - The term cybersecurity threat means an action, not protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, on or through an information system that may result in an unauthorized effort to adversely impact the security, availability, confidentiality, or integrity of an information system or information that is stored on, processed by, or transiting an information system. That is quite a far cry from "anything that makes information unavailable or less available". The First Amendment qualifier itself offers extremely broad protections, since the only qualifying actions would be things which the government could already legally forbid (that is, any communication which would already be protected from censorship or government reprisal under the First Amendment would not qualify as a threat under this bill). Do journalists even read these bills they're reporting on? All that said, it's Feinstein, so it's a pretty good bet that she's serving a corporate interest with this bill and has absol-friggin-lutely no idea about the technology she's proposing to regulate. All that said, can someone make a cogent (hah) argument as to why network engineers should not be able to benevolently police their networks to minimize the degradation of flow of information? That's the side of net neutrality that nobody ever really seems to talk about - we all want to keep business interests from extorting companies through traffic shaping (which is legitimate), but then we all want high-priority routing for all our latency-sensitive traffic, even if our neighbor is torrenting a copy of all the porn on the internet. Net neutrality is a two-edged sword, one which would prevent monopolistic abuses at the expense of exposing the network to failure by tragedy of the commons, and I constantly wonder why we fail to talk about the flipside of the dumb pipes coin.