"Breaking Silicon Valley's Silence"? What? Didn't Google lobby in favor of CISPA, and Facebook support it publicly?
This is also a very misleading summary of the history behind CISPA. It suggests that late-breaking amendments to CISPA widened its impact; in fact, unless you're concerned about child pornography or bodily-harm threats, the later amendments to CISPA drastically narrowed the act's reach. The bill the House passed adopted the classic C-I-A triad (confidentiality, availability, integrity) to define "cyber threat", and explicitly exempted "threats" that target only "consumer licensing".
I don't support CISPA, but the media's track record in representing it is terrible. This is unsurprising: they benefit directly from outrage about this silly bill, since outrage -> rageviews -> ad dollars.
So, it narrowed the act's reach from widespread spying, you say? Sounds like the 'terrible' reporting worked for the people.
The silence they're referring to, are companies that are 'either silent or quietly supportive of the controversial bill', in the first paragraph. I thought Google and Facebook made sense with their support to legitimatising privacy violations, allowing greater business freedom?
Do you have the link to the latest CISPA bill?
Also, what is your analysis of the latest CISPA bill that it offers? What's also in it for technology companies?
I'm not a lawyer, I just play one on message boards. That said:
These aren't really privacy law exemptions so much as they are clarifications. It is very unlikely that anyone would prevail in a suit against an ISP who shared their private information incident to an actual attack on their network under the current privacy laws in the US. The ECPA explicitly carves out exceptions for this kind of sharing already. CISPA does almost nothing but modernize the language.
In fact, because ECPA carves out exemptions to privacy for any action that can be reasonably construed as "protecting the service", CISPA may narrow the current exemptions. If your ISP tomorrow said "sign this contract that covenants that you won't use BitTorrent", the ECPA probably allows them to capture, inspect, and share your personal information incident to investigating you pirating software. CISPA explicitly does not allow that --- it literally contains language saying that consumer contract terms are out of the scope of CISPA.
Again, bracket this whole thing (as always, please) with an implied "from a plain reading, to a layperson". A lawyer or legislative professional might catch something sinister here that I've missed. I do not find EFF's "catches" here particularly convincing. Others clearly do.
The fact that some of these internet companies, such as Google, haven't taken a formal position is perplexing...or maybe not considering this may benefit their shareholders at the expense of society's privacy. Well, at least the non-profit is speaking out. I wonder if me posting something like this constitutes as a "national security" threat?
Unfortunately Mozilla is losing a lot of its weight with Firefox losing traction fast. Which is a shame, because it's still one of the best browsers out there, and it's distributed without a commercial agenda in mind.
This is also a very misleading summary of the history behind CISPA. It suggests that late-breaking amendments to CISPA widened its impact; in fact, unless you're concerned about child pornography or bodily-harm threats, the later amendments to CISPA drastically narrowed the act's reach. The bill the House passed adopted the classic C-I-A triad (confidentiality, availability, integrity) to define "cyber threat", and explicitly exempted "threats" that target only "consumer licensing".
I don't support CISPA, but the media's track record in representing it is terrible. This is unsurprising: they benefit directly from outrage about this silly bill, since outrage -> rageviews -> ad dollars.