Government Has Already Fooled Us More Than Once On Privacy; History Belies How

CISPA Will Be Used

Headquarters of the NSA at Fort Meade, Marylan...

Headquarters of the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland. Español: Instalaciones generales de la NSA en Fort Meade, Maryland. Русский: Штаб-квартира АНБ, Форт-Мид, Мэриленд, США (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

from the let's-get-real dept

One of the key things we've seen in the pushback on CISPA is that its backers insist that people arguing against it don't really understand how the bill works, and that it does protect privacy. CISPA sponsor Rep. Mike Rogers himself took to Twitter this morning to tell the EFF that it's misreading his bill. But, of course, as we've seen, it seems that Rogers himself is the one being misleading when it comes to privacy. If he truly believed in privacy protections, he would have supported a variety of straightforward amendments that made it clear how privacy could be protected. But he didn't. Instead, he clearly left it open for abuse.

 One of the key points that Rogers keeps saying over and over again is that this bill is not a "surveillance" bill. Why? Because it doesn't allow the NSA or others to go in and automatically get info. But Rogers is choosing his words very carefully, such that he absolutely misrepresents how the bill can and almost certainly will be used. And while he and other CISPA supporters will (and have) argued that the possible abuses of CISPA are crazy conspiracy theories that wouldn't happen in practice, we have too many examples of how the US government's intelligence infrastructure very quickly expands to make use of every single loophole provided to them within the law -- sometimes going so far as to interpret laws in ways clearly contrary to Congressional intent, just because they can. Let's just highlight two examples:

 

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