CISPA is back

[Oranjui]

http://www.cispaisback.org/
*sigh*

discussion go



Is it really worth fighting for? Complete privacy isn't and cannot be a reality, for anyone. And if your privacy is compromised at the cost of keeping society in a better place to defend itself? So ♥♥♥♥ what? The only part that really bothers me is the big tech firms trying to get involved. There's no reason for that part of it. I'd be totally alright if it were just the NSA though. Isolated false alarms really aren't that bad as opposed to potentially allowing some sort of mass terror attack to occur. They're doing their job fine as is, okay, I'll give you that. But is it really worth wasting all of this money on bickering over it? Surveillance is a necessary evil in this day and age. We just need to get over it.

[*Emelia K. Fletcher]

defeatistcore

[Venexis]

Surveillance is a necessary evil in this day and age.

The issue for me at least is not the surveillance. It's about who has access to it, and for what reasons, and who is exempt.

Would I be fine having all the data that defines who I am as a person in one convenient bundle? Not really, but I accept that it's pretty much inevitable. It would make almost every aspect of modern life from medical treatment to bank affairs to interpersonal relationships vastly easier, and yeah, it could even prevent some national tragedies from happening in the future. As far as that goes, I agree with you.

It's not at all necessary, though. There would still be bombings, there would still be shootings, and there would still be terrorism. Maybe less frequently, but there will always be some "warning signs" that surveillance misses. This is unavoidable, as it is not necessarily a problem with the surveillance itself, but with the corruptible nature of humanity. This is the problem with CISPA. It's not a solution that targets the source of the problem, instead, it attempts to gloss over it with fancy language and fear-mongering. "You need to give us these rights so that we can protect you" the government says, knowing full well that the terrorism will not stop. When does it end? When the violence continues, we all know what will happen again:

"You need to give us these rights so that we can protect you."

For me, CISPA isn't a fight against surveillance, it's a fight to protect the rights assigned to me as a citizen of a country based on firmly established freedoms. Freedoms that, if tampered with, no longer align with the idea of the "land of the free." I'm not sure how the constitution works exactly, but isn't reasonable suspicion a thing?* If CISPA passes, reasonable suspicion of cyberattacks would no longer be required. Anyone could have their computer identity searched on a whim and we, the people who are required to hold the government accountable and stop exactly this kind of ♥♥♥♥ from happening, would have no legal ground to protest. If we give up here, we have less ability to fight it next time.

On the surface, CISPA is an incredibly ambiguous proposal that could potentially be used to combat threats to security or snoop on anyone's data without retribution. Deeper than that though, it symbolizes the beginning of a very important period in our history. Will we protest, obligated by our democratic role to keep the government in check? Or will we give in when things start to get hard and let the rights people in less fortunate countries envy us for be destroyed, one by one?

*Edit, the Fourth Amendment mentions it with regard to material property, but again, this is exactly the kind of thing we need to stand for if proposals like CISPA are trying to violate our digital property.

[Oranjui]

I'm not saying that we need to give in immediately and let the government win. They're going to keep finding workarounds. There's already surveillance going on which has proven beneficial, even if it's a little frightening to the public. A few months back I saw a leak showing that a number near 5 large-level, legitimate potential threats were stopped last year by the NSA. And they can't just go around telling people that without causing panic, so they have to go with reasoning like "accessing more information could help prevent terror attacks" instead of "we aren't preventing enough terror attacks, let us access more information".

In the end what I really mean is that everyone, including the government, just needs to quit fighting over it. Nobody's giving in to the other party in this situation, we'd just be calling it a truce. We stop wasting money on a petty little fight that's not going to do very much at all whether this CISA thing or whatever they propose in the future passes or not. It just really irks me that we, as a society, can't move on to more pressing issues than monitoring people's internet usage. Practical things, like education and energy and pollution and generally most things that don't have to do with war, image, the internet, etc.