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Earlier
this year, strong public opposition led by several prominent websites forced
Congressional leaders to cancel votes on two bills known in Washington as
“SOPA” and “PIPA.” Both of these bills threatened
search engines and websites with possible shutdowns if the Justice Department
deemed them insufficiently cooperative with our phony “war on
terror,” or if they were merely accused of copyright infringement. Fortunately
the American public flooded Capitol Hill with phone calls and Congressional
leaders dropped both bills.
But we
should never underestimate the federal government’s insatiable desire
to control the internet. Statists of all parties, persuasions, and
nationalities hate the free, unbridled flow of information, ideas, and goods
via the internet. They resent the notion that ordinary people can communicate
and trade across the world without government filters or approvals. So they
continually seek to impose controls, always under the guise of fighting
terrorism or protecting “intellectual property” rights.
The latest
assault on internet freedom is called the “Cyber Intelligence Sharing
and Protection Act,” or “CISPA,” which may be considered by
Congress this week. CISPA is essentially an internet monitoring bill that
permits both the federal government and private companies to view your
private online communications with no judicial oversight--provided, of
course, that they do so in the name of “cybersecurity.”
The bill is very broadly written, and allows the Department of Homeland
Security to obtain large swaths of personal information contained in your
emails or other online communication. It also allows emails and private
information found online to be used for purposes far beyond any reasonable
definition of fighting cyberterrorism.
CISPA
represents an alarming form of corporatism, as it further intertwines
government with companies like Google and Facebook. It permits them to hand
over your private communications to government officials without a warrant,
circumventing well-established federal laws like the Wiretap Act and the
Electronic Communications Privacy Act. It also grants them broad immunity
from lawsuits for doing so, leaving you without recourse for invasions of
privacy. Simply put, CISPA encourages some of our most successful internet
companies to act as government spies, sowing distrust of social media and
chilling communication in one segment of the world economy where America
still leads.
Proponents
of CISPA may be well-intentioned, but they unquestionably are leading us
toward a national security state rather than a free constitutional republic.
Imagine having government-approved employees embedded at Facebook, complete
with federal security clearances, serving as conduits for secret information
about their American customers. If you believe in privacy and free markets,
you should be deeply concerned about the proposed marriage of government
intelligence gathering with private, profit-seeking companies. CISPA is Big
Brother writ large, putting the resources of private
industry to work for the nefarious purpose of spying on the American people.We can only hope the public responds to CISPA as
it did to SOPA back in January. I urge you to learn more about the bill by
reading a synopsis provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on their
website at eff.org. I also urge you to call your federal Senators and
Representatives and urge them to oppose CISPA and similar bills that attack
internet freedom.
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