Did you notice that CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Ac), the law on cybersecurity, already went through another version in the House and is moving along and could be passed, although rather weakened? There was a push to get it finished before the end of July, says The Hill.
And there is some theorizing that Obama isn't going to veto it as he promised, and as Alec Ross said he promised, and as he has written in an op-ed piece in which in the fine print, he says he would veto the bill if it violated civil rights. The language is the sort that Democrats often adopt when they are trying to seem patriotic and militant to critics on the right:
This approach stays true to our values as a society that cherishes free enterprise and the rights of the individual. Cybersecurity standards would be developed in partnership between government and industry. For the majority of critical infrastructure companies already meeting these standards, nothing more would be expected. Companies needing to upgrade their security would have the flexibility to decide how best to do so using the wide range of innovative products and services available in the marketplace. Moreover, our approach protects the privacy and civil liberties of the American people. Indeed, I will veto any bill that lacks strong privacy and civil-liberties protections.
Now, why isn't "The Internet" -- as the flashmobs and Mitch Kapor and Soros-funded nonprofits and networks of Silicon Valley tech web sites and blogs call themselves -- screaming? Why are there only a few scattered critical blogs? Why isn't there endless re-tweeting?
We all saw "The Internet" turn out 7 million (!) signatures when Google whiplashed already-heavily-incited geeks and Redditt types to sign petitions against the Stop Online Piracy Act to "prevent censorship" and their favourite websites like Tumblr or Youtube from "being taken down". Wikipedia even blacked out their web site for a day, remember, sending hundreds of thousands of homework-procrastinators into a tizzy.
SOPA never even came to a vote. It was shelved and likely won't come back, although it could, if Obama is defeated in the next elections and some more congress people feel more confident if they can win the battle on the bill over cybersecurity -- they're definitely related.
But basically, once "The Internet" had spoken -- hordes of teenagers on Tumblr and young women on Facebook and young men on Youtube responding to "viral videos" produced by anti-copyright cadres, and heeding the whistles from TechCrunch or Ars Technica or Mashable -- SOPA was dead. This was treated as a big victory for "the progressives". Beth Noveck even said confidently at the Tech@State conference a few weeks ago that after the battle against Komen was won, and SOPA, why there was no stopping them. Forward to the victories of technocommunism!
So why isn't there any noise about the cybersecurity bill? Oh, sure, Boingboing.net complained a few times. Electronic Frontier Foundation naturally bitched, and has tried to whip up sentiment, as have its spin-off groups like the Internet Defense League -- which has made a "call to action" which largely seems to be ignored -- because nobody is talking about it anywhere on Facebook, Twitter, or G+.
There was some blogging back in April like this -- and of course techdirt.com which had to concede defeat -- but then, not much, except for the paid-for nonprofit organizations doing their astro-turfing. In May, Andy Greenberg even spoke of "Silicon Valley's silence" -- until Mozilla spoke (but that's just Mitch Kapor again.)
But it's just not "going viral". It's just not working. No teenagers care. There isn't a youtube, or if there is, it doesn't have gadzillion views.
Now why is that?
Answer: because Google isn't siccing its dogs on this one, at least not yet.
His Master's Voice -- the RCA Victrola-style dog that is the tech press -- haven't received instructions or picked up their Twitter cues to protest hard on this -- at least not yet.
The "Save the Internet" Mitch Kapor organizations are busy trying to get people to sign their ill-advised manifesto, and the paid and unpaid social media meisters are too busy right now inciting hatred against the Boy Scouts and Chick-fil-A -- as if these were tech issues -- to ponder the vicissitudes of CISPA.
Now why is that?
Campaign fatique? You can only call the dogs out so often, they get bored and tired?
It's not just because it's summer or the Olympics. Summer has nothing to do with it, and in todays multi-media snacking environment, the Internet hordes can rove around a mile a minute on any topic and consume oceans of information every hour, "distracted from distraction by distraction." If they are needed to rescue Google's business model, they'll respond on cue instantly.
Perhaps the lack of frenzy is because Facebook, IBM and other big IT companies supported the cybersecurity bill when it first came out, and that split Silicon Valley. It just wasn't as easy to stampede the geeks and then the kids when Facebook and IBM were supporting something. Google didn't say it was opposed but didn't support it either and seemed to be laying low like Br'er Rabbit.
Now, maybe "The Internet" didn't have to be whipped up because Sen. John McCain (R-Az) suddenly up and opposed the bill on libertarian grounds, that it would mean too much government interference in business.
I supposed CISPA in its original redaction because I thought the concerns about privacy were simply hyped as hysterical hypetheticals just like SOPA's "censorship" was. Having seen through the charade that the SOPA hysteria was, I will never, ever believe any of those Cassandras again.
The government wasn't mandating ISPs or platform providers to pre-emptively monitor their customers, it was asking for voluntary cooperation in sharing data about cyber attacks. The notion that laws are designed for narrow purposes that have to be defended in independent courts completely escapes literalist binary-thinkers on the geek squad.
What I particularly liked about CISPA is that it had a clause saying basically, "Concerned about invasion of privacy? OK, we urge you to submit your case and we will look at it and adjust accordingly." In other words, it challenged they hysterics to come up with cases, something they don't have. Cases, with facts. Not edge-casing what-ifs. I was waiting to see them.
As for government regulating industry, I'm not as afraid of this as libertarians nor do I endorse it as much as the "progressives" do -- very selectively. You know, like they want the government to interfere to regulate the wildly fluctuating and complex question of bandwidth consumption and supply by ISPs, but then they want the government to go away while the script-kiddies crash sites from the Pentagon to Amazon for things they don't like politically, or "just for the lulz".
In his carefully crafted op-ed piece, written likely by the "CTO of America" or one of the other hired geeks temporarily on leave from Silicon Valley to serve their country in government, Obama makes it sound like he really understands the threat to the Internet and concedes it is real. But given how ready he is nevertheless to veto it on vague notions of privacy invasion, we have to wonder.
Some professional war scholars like Thomas Rid and collectivists and Anonymous boosters like Yochai Benkler are saying there isn't any threat in cyberspace, and it's all concocted as an excuse to get more defense money or get more jobs for defense contractors. Like...that's any different from the way every single piece of software generated by Silicon Valley is all about jobs for geeks?!
The geeks start the clock running only on Stuxnet, too, which is really tendentious and misleading -- like this piece.
Iran -- you know, Iran? -- itself started its revoluntary assault on its own people and on emigres abroad and critics -- back in the 1970s before there was any Internet. Iran, one of the world's worst authoritarian states, is the prior condition. Iran threatens its own people, jailing and executing some, assassinating opposition abroad -- and is belligerent to its neighbours, periodically announcing that Israel should be wiped off the map. Iran! And what the US and Israel do indeed is figure out how to fight this awful threat, which isn't just the theocratic state itself, but appears in the form of Tehran's support of Hezbollah and other terrorist movements. And that's ok.
Do I think it's ok to sabotage another country's infrastructure, even if they are totalitarians? No, I don't. I do think we have to oppose cyberwar and work toward some kind of international treaty on refraining from cyberattacks.
Realistically, however, attacking the computers operating the controversial nuclear power stations is a less belligerent and dangerous option than actually attacking Israel with bombs. Life is about choices.
And even if you don't make the distinction between Iran's prior analog belligerence and today's Western cyber response, you could still point out all the hostile things Iran does in cyberspace, not only blocking the Internet for its own people but engineering things like the theft of a laptop with plans for the president's helicopter on it.
Then of course there's the attacks from Russia and China. At the Dublin OSCE conference, a NATO spokesman said that most of the cyberattacks in the region come from "Eastern Europe". That's a polite way of saying "Russia."
Sen. Joe Lieberman, the independent who was vilified for asking Amazon to stop storing WikiLeaks' stolen State Department cables (good for him!) has pushed for this bill due to his legitimate concern for security.
In it's more watered-down version currently, the bill gives the Internet companies immunity from prosecution -- so they are happy, now that that their "safe haven" and "common carrier" status aren't jeopardized.
Basically, what we're seeing with this lack of "The Internet" frenzy, however, is evidence of just how thin, just how scattered, just how disorganized, and just how ineffective in fact the geek lobby is. They seemed mighty and unstoppable with their "7 million signatures" to stop SOPA. Now they aren't appearing in anything like that number and aren't stopping CISPA. And the reason isn't that there aren't some among them who are sincere anarchists and fighters for their version of freedom.
The reason is that Google hasn't decided to sic their fanboyz and attack dogs on this yet -- and that's how we can see, with a kind of lost-wax casting method, how fake the anti-SOPA frenzy was. The congress people should have called their bluff back then and held firm. They should have said, sure, we are concerned, and...bring us any cases. We'll take a look...
They were spooked, but they doubled down on cybersecurity since that's more important than piracy, as it concerns the very infrastructure of the country and large government and business processes.
The funny thing about all this is Sen. McCain -- whom the Voice savagely counted among one of the people "trying to ruin the Internet" for his support of SOPA -- is what is in fact holding up this bill now over "freedom" concerns. They just aren't "The Internet's" freedom concerns, as they involve commerce and business, which Anonymous and the open source cultists hate. McCain also rightly opposed "net neutrality" -- it's really a bandwidth consumption issue and the same libertarianism that makes him want to get government out of the Internet-security-regulation business prompted him to oppose the "net neutrality" gambit.
Has Google just decided to lobby in a more sophisticated fashion this time along, to sort of keep their powder dry? That could be it. Google disclosed that it was using its lobbying arm against CISPA back in April.
"We think this is an important issue and we're watching the process closely but we haven't taken a formal position on any specific legislation," the spokeswoman said.
They've been in that fake mode since, although furiously working behind the scenes.
Far from screeching all over the Internet about this, Anonymous -- whose shock-troops will organize the onslaught and take down the websites of anyone supporting legislation they don't like -- has this rather sedate blog on the topic on a Russian site which I see they swiped from this site called net-security.org. Hmm. Who hasn't let the dogs out?
One of the most vocal critics of the bill is the Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member John McCain. As the majority of USA's critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector, he is against any type of State intervention in things like setting up security-related standards.
The bill’s sponsors are trying to push for a vote on the legislation as soon as possible - Senator Lieberman even said that the bill won't survive if the Senate doesn't consider it before the upcoming August recess. In a floor speech, Mr. McCain clearly objected to this pressure and added a remark that "it is not the right way to move forward with little or no opportunity for debate and amendments".
Oh, please. This has been in debate for years. And the real reason they have to hurry is that at any moment, Google may let slip the dogs of war.
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