So Long CISPA!!!

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By BitcoDavid

Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out! Ziff Davis among others, is reporting that the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA is dead in the Senate. Apparently, the bill contained insufficient privacy protections. This site, joined 900 others in a protest of the bill this past week.

Not only has the Senate refused to take up the controversial bill, but the White House has stated that President Obama would exercise his veto option if CISPA ever made it to his desk.

To those of you ruled by fear, let me set you straight. Martial Law won’t protect you. Brigades of black helicopters and uparmored Humvees won’t protect you. A militarized police force – armed with machine guns and chemical crowd control agents won’t protect you, and above all, private corporations most certainly won’t protect you. All you’re doing is giving away the store, to thugs who are all too glad to take it off your hands.

And what’s true in the streets is equally true in Cyberspace.

Sure, bad things happen. And all too often, they happen to good people, but the odds are really stacked against you ever losing your bank account to some subterranean Hacker, bent on stealing your hard earned identity. The built in protections are really quite good, and those who seek to defeat those protections will always do so, no matter how much you legislate away our liberties.

Bills are drafted by lobbyists. Any time a law is proposed, you need to ask yourself who lobbied for it. At the end of the trail, you will almost always find some corporate interest, seeking to protect profits. CISPA is no different. You know who wants CISPA? Sony Music, ASCAP, AOL, Time Warner, Verizon and Comcast. The very same people who turned my Internet into a shopping mall.

In 1980, I began my transition from the world of analog tech to the world of digital tech. I built a switching matrix keyboard for a company that sought to automate the chore of taxi-cab dispatching. Back in those days, the big deal processor was the Z-80, and the Internet was called the BBS – or Bulletin Board System. It was all geeks and physicists, who would cradle their telephone receivers in slow, clumsy analog modems and link up their Ataris and Apple IIs.

But for all the effort – an evening spent trying to download a single Kb of data was not uncommon – the entire system was free. By which I mean socially and intellectually free, not economically free. We had to pay huge long distance phone rates. But the information – the data – was free. The Internet as I know it may already be dead – turned into a massive Google-driven superstore – but I like to believe that it lives here. In the Blogosphere. Here in the last bastion of free citizen journalism – the last fortress of self published writers and radical speakers.

So, I say this. So long CISPA. Better luck next time, Sony. And the rest of you? Blog. Blog hard, blog often and say what’s on your mind.

Long live a free and vibrant Internet.

BitcoDavid is a blogger and a blog site consultant. In former lives, he was an audio engineer, a videographer, a teacher – even a cab driver. He is an avid health and fitness enthusiast and a Pro/Am boxer. He has spent years working with diet and exercise to combat obesity and obesity related illness.

 

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