You Should Be Upset That CISPA Didn't Pass, and Don't Gloat, it Will Be Back!

People need to get their heads on more straight about CISPA -- which just got cabbaged in the Senate and now may only survive in dismembered chunks.

My comment:

Say, were any of you unhappy that when the Boston marathon suspects blew up bombs and killed 3 people and injured some 200, that the following things happened:

o private stores had surveillance video tapes that they instantly gave to law-enforcement
o hundreds of people had phone pictures and video footage they gave to law-enforcement
o police and FBI were able to go instantly to the suspects' social media accounts and look at them and gain access to them, public and private
o they could geo-locate the terrorist because his escaped hostage's phone was in the car and it could be instantly traced
o Reddit was able to freely discuss hypotheses about suspects and compare pictures with others that might fit the description -- without facing arrest or censorship.

Were any of you a little worried that this also happened and yet...it wasn't enough to stop them?

o These suspects, who killed people and removed the legs and arms of numerous victims with their deadly act, had a year's worth of extremest jihad video viewing, including videos that even liberal Google had to remove
o A foreign power without much scruples about people's privacy saw and noted this and warned the FBI what it meant, as they also had other intel about the kinds of groups and movements these people were in touch with possibly (Russia)
o The FBI could study their social media viewing habits, and learn about their travels abroad and other movements

And then this:

o Some people got wrongly identified by Reddit, although no false arrests were made.

See, that's how you have to think about this. How these things will be balanced and really done, using common sense principles that already existed, like insisting that the protection of free speech ends where it becomes incitement to imminent violence.

You can't think about abstract hypotheticals that some teenage Tumblr blog or hip-hop site is going to be taken down unfairly. You have to think about how you're going to really fight terrorism practically as it socializes and spreads. You won't have the moral luxury to think of it any other way.