Ready for SOPA round 2?Follow

iiiiiiit's Baaaaaack!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, why are these people not being recalled or impeached over this ****?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/06/mpaa_sopa_returns/

MPAA boss: 'SOPA isn’t dead yet'
House debates CISPA – SOPA on steroids

By Iain Thomson in San Francisco

Posted in Law, 6th April 2012 19:53 GMT

Former senator and current head of the Motion Picture ***. of America Chris Dodd hopes to resurrect the reviled SOPA anti-piracy legislation in another form, but it appears the US House of Representatives is beating him to it a new bill that makes SOPA look sensible.

Dodd, speaking in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, said that he hopes to get a new version of the SOPA legislation ready for debate shortly, and that the MPAA was marshaling its forces for another attack on piracy. Dodd said he was confident that the new legislation would go through, and said there are those in the technology industry who support such laws.

"I regret that Steve Jobs isn't around today. At least he understood the connection between content and technology," Dodd said. "The fellow who started eBay, Jeff Skoll, gets it. There are not a huge number of people who understand that content and technology absolutely need each other, so I'm counting on the fact that there are people like Jeff and others who are smart and highly respected in both communities. Between now and sometime next year [after the presidential election], the two industries need to come to an understanding."

Dodd also let slip some interesting snippets on the arrest of Kim Dotcom, who is currently awaiting extradition over charges related to the Megaupload file-sharing site. The MPAA chieftain quoted a discussion with an unnamed Justice Department official whom he met at his daughter's school, who said that the DoJ had been waiting for Dotcom's birthday party before striking, so that the team behind Megaupload would all be present.

Dodd refused to criticize President Obama for his expressions of concern over the SOPA legislation, saying he was confident the president would address the needs of both Hollywood and those concerned with internet privacy. However, a bill currently being considered by the US House of Representatives could make the SOPA legislation look positively idyllic.

The bill, HR 3523, dubbed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), was introduced by representatives Mike Rogers (R-MI) and "Dutch" Ruppersberger (D-MD) in November, and is currently attracting serious political support. CISPA would allow any federal agency to request internet and communications logs of individuals from their service provider, and guarantees immunity from prosecution for companies that cooperate with the government.

"Under the bill," wrote Greg Nojeim, senior counsel to the Center for Democracy and Technology in a blog post, "when communications data is shared with the government, it could be used to prosecute an individual for any crime, used to target him or her for intelligence surveillance, and shared among governmental agencies to the extent permitted by current law and used by those agencies for any lawful non-regulatory governmental purpose. The bill itself places no limits on secondary use or dissemination of unclassified cyber threat information. Under the bill, the data can even be used to target advertising."

The bill states that such information could only be requested for a "cyber security purpose," but leaves the definition of this concept unspecified, and adds that security need not be the only reason for data to be handed over. The data can be made anonymous, but that's only voluntary for those companies handing it over.

What with the forthcoming ACTA vote this summer in the European Parliament, and with SOPA back in the cards and CISPA now on the table, it looks to be a busy year for online-privacy activists. ®

So...it's the Patriot Act?

Oh look, cysec firms can not be sued. Guess that's why they have so many letters of support.

it looks to be a busy year for online-privacy activists

Hello, I'm Realpolitik. I can see we've never met. I just thought I'd go ahead and introduce myself, as a concept, so you're familiar with me when people refer to me when explaining why laws written by groups that fund elections are passed.

That looks like cruel and unusual punishment.

CISPA made worse, then passed?

It passed the House of Reps, I doubt it gets passed the Senate let alone to Obama's desk.

Now the only reason needed to take away privacy rights is "protection of children.:" I'm sure that won't be abused.

It already has a veto threat but contact your senator if you're worried. A veto threat doesn't preclude a couple amendments and a "it's all better now... pass"

Way to ruin my Friday Congress.

The 4th amendment has never really applied to online activity, something some of us have been warning folks who seem overly eager to plaster the interwebs with personal information and then be shocked when that information is used against them for 15 years or so. As a general rule, anything you do online falls legally somewhere between a rented private space and a rented public space depending on what you're doing. And frankly, the laws are consistent with regard to similar laws in non-online environments. If you go to a restaurant and are seated at a table, you have no expectation that your conversation at that table is private, nor would law enforcement require a warrant to listen in on you. BTW, that's what you're doing when you post on an online forum (like this one), or on facebook (which is an interesting bit of tangle legal mess btw due to how its structured).

The only online areas where you have any expectation of privacy at all is space you have paid for with a contract to an online service. So your account with your ISP is (somewhat) private. Email stored there requires a warrant to read. It's analogous to renting a hotel room or an apartment. However, just like with those real world cases, the owner of the space who's renting it to you is responsible for ensuring that you aren't violating the law. In the same way that law enforcement can apply legal pressure on a property owner if his tenant is operating a meth lab, they can apply legal pressure to online service providers to do the same. This typically manifests in some requirement for those owners to provide access to the traffic information so law enforcement can look for patterns which indicate illegal activity. Which is more or less exactly what we're seeing here.


It's not really that shocking, and it certainly shouldn't be surprising. Not to anyone who's been looking at this issue for any length of time. At the end of the day, you don't own the servers or wires that your online data is traversing. Someone else does. And that person is liable for the use of those things and that's how they're going to put pressure back onto the end consumer of their services. Again though, this is no different from any other owner with regard to potentially illegal activities involving their property. The law will take some time (still!) to iron out the boundaries of public versus private spaces with regards to online activities. I just think that blanket declarations of privacy violation anytime there's a law that does anything in this area is somewhat counter productive.

In an odd way, we need laws like this (yes, even with bad things in them) to allow that process to move forward. You have to have the law first before it can be challenged and allow our courts to work out where those boundaries should be. Absent that, all we have is a bunch of internet lawyers, most of them with their own pet vested interest in the issue, speculating about what the laws should be, and what should be a violation and what shouldn't. Ultimately, we need to let the courts decide that IMO. And just as this issue has never stopped in the real world, it's unlikely to have a single magical determination in the online world either. But unless we allow that process to work, we'll be stuck speculating and not knowing. And in the meantime, as much as we all want to maximize our protections, we also do need some consistent rules for law enforcement in this area. Any step is a good step at this point.