Hass & Associates Online Reviews: Aaron Swartz Can’t Fight the New Cybersecurity Bill, So We Must Do It

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Hass Associates Online Reviews
Aaron Swartz Cant Fight the New Cybersecurity
Bill, So We Must Do It
http//www.truthdig.com/report/item/aaron_swartz_c
ant_fight_the_new_cybersecurity_bill_so_we_must_20
140713
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In late 2011 and early 2012, activists,
progressive politicians and Internet companies
led in part by Internet freedom advocate Aaron
Swartz came together to defeat the Stop Online
Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).
Advertised as measures against copyright
infringement, the bills would have opened any
website that contained copyrighted material it
was not authorized to publish on any of its pages
to a forced shutdown.
A site that unknowingly held a copyrighted image
in a comment section, for instance, would have
been eligible as a violator. Virtually everyone
was susceptible to closure.
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The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act
(CISPA) followed SOPA and PIPA in April 2012.
CISPA was worse than its predecessors, proposing
that private companies be allowed to share user
information, a provision that would have violated
many privacy protections of the Internet.
Recognizing this, Swartz fought again. It sort
of lets the government run roughshod over privacy
protections and share personal data about you,
he said of the bill at the time. Again, he
prevailed.   Now, a year and a half after Swartz
killed himself, there is the Cybersecurity
Information Sharing Act. CISA is a lot like
CISPA, but could end up being even worse. Privacy
and civil rights groups including the ACLU and
the Electronic Frontier Foundation are standing
up to fight it. In an article about the bill, the
ACLUs Sandra Fulton wrote CISA poses serious
threats to our privacy, gives the government
extraordinary powers to silence potential
whistleblowers, and exempts these dangerous new
powers from transparency laws. The bill has been
approved by the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence and will move to the Senate soon.
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Gabe Rottman, a legislative counsel and policy
adviser for the ACLU, spoke with Truthdig about
CISA. He said the legislation resembles not only
CISPA, but the proposed Cybersecurity Act of
2012, which according to him would have been a
better bill for protecting privacy and preventing
government overreach. It represented a
compromise between the privacy community,
industry and the folks pushing cybersecurity on
the Hill, he said of the 2012 legislation. That
bill did not pass. CISA borrows some of its
elements and removes its privacy and civil rights
protections.   It would allow the use of
information that is shared with the government
for cybersecurity purposes to be used in the
prevention and investigation of crime under the
Espionage Act, which includes national security
leaks and whistle-blowers, Rottman added. He
said CISA would allow government intelligence
agencies not only to retrieve metadata from
communication companies on a voluntary basis,
but also to collect content from emails, texts or
other written communications without a warrant.
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Once the information is in the possession of the
Department of Homeland Security, the measure
would allow it to be shared with other government
entities such as the NSA and the military and
possibly even local police forces. It could
quite literally become an investigative tool,
Rottman said. CISA could enable the government to
approach a communications company and find
bundles of communications from a number of
suspects anytime a new whistle-blower is
suspected. It has a provision that is meant to
protect people. Personal information is supposed
to be removed if it isnt related to a
cybersecurity threat, but its unclear how much
information would actually be scrubbed. A
further problem with CISA is that it removes
protections under Freedom of Information Act and
state laws that would allow people to inquire
whether their communications have been collected.
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Rottman said that the chance youll find out
that your information has been shared is lessened
because of the FOIA exception, and there is an
incentive for oversharing, and the information
automatically gets shared with the rest of the
government. Furthermore, the bill protects
companies that share information from being
scrutinized for having done so. Additionally,
CISA doesnt affect just whistle-blowers and
those people who could be considered serious
threats to intelligence agencies. It applies to
anyone the government could deem a cybersecurity
threat as well. This qualification for suspicion
is very broad.   In the case against Swartz over
his massive, unauthorized downloading of
commercial academic journals from MIT, the courts
used the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984 to
prosecute him, alleging that downloading the
journals was a violation of the networks terms
of service.
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Under the CFAA, violating the terms of service
for any website or Internet tool is considered a
criminal offense. For instance, lying about ones
age when registering with a website or
accidentally breaking a rule listed in user
contracts with Facebook or an email platform
could make one a culprit. Under CISA, such
harmless violations would make user
communications legally vulnerable to government
access. Privacy and civil rights groups also
contend CISA does not contain any provisions to
protect Net neutrality. Where the Cybersecurity
Act of 2012 maintained that terms like
cybersecurity threat could not be used to
inflict damage on open Internet rules, CISA
contains no such language.
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The ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation and many
organizations believe CISA would be a boon to the
NSA and other intelligence agencies, as well as a
serious threat to privacy and protection from
warrantless investigation. The Fourth Amendment
is meant to protect Americans from such
monitoring, but CISA could erase that civil
right. Swartz led the fight against the death of
our privacy, an open Internet and protection from
persecution online. In his absence, others are
stepping up to the plate. People continue to be
outraged over the revelations made by NSA
whistle-blower Edward Snowden, but the government
continues to pump steroids into the spy agencys
far-reaching arms.     Visit our
website   http//hassassociates-online.com/ http
//hassassociates-online.com/articles/