Actually, the revised CISPA bill has no censorship, bo. It is about information sharing between government and private companies to stop cyber attacks and the only censoring is making that information anonymous when the government shares with private companies and restricting those companies from using that information for anything more than shoring up against a cyber attack. It also forbids big brother and those private companies from using hacking techniques to read emails and such. Where it falls short is in requiring private companies to scrub the data they share. So long as your emails plotting the next cyberattack are PGP encrypted and you use SSL to send them from your machine to the email server, you have nothing to worry about. You can still coordinate your cyber attacks and the only way the government or these companies would know is if they broke the law and hacked the email or your account.

I don't need my internet activity watched. They don't need to care.

they were already breaking the law on the privacy. but they could not go to an isp and say 'ok we broke the law to find out this information, now given this illegal information please censor user x'. and they could not use this illegally obtained information in court. cispa just makes it that much worse that now they can use this in court and now they can use it to tell isps to censor you.

i dont know what you are talking about with plotting attacks, but as i said they were always doing this because they dont care what the law is. this may make it a bit easier for them, now they can just tell private companies to give them everything they have (although most major ones were anyway)... but they could get most of that information anyway through other means.

You activity is already watched. Every packet you send goes into a buffer somewhere and the non-encrypted ones are there as plain text for anyone at the ISP to see. How do you think all those targeted ads appear? I have been seeing ads for Mercedes Benz of Cincinnati since I started the search for what would eventually be my car, even before visiting MB Cinci. It's just a matter of if they share it or not. This just provides both sides with indemnity for sharing info.

And the fact that I am against CISPA doesn't mean that I'm perfectly fine with those too, Draug. They don't need to watch the things I do. The more they press it, the more I hate it.

I know sprollmerflag posted something (it flashed before the javascript hid it) and I assume it was something about they already do it and this is just a CYA things or some rot and that it somehow forces companies to give themn info, but all that is bullshit. It is voluntary on any participating company's part and I can almost guarantee it will start appearing in TOS's that they share and then user outcry will force the company's to say they won't share via CISPA.

The simple fact is that cyber attacks are coordinated using encrypted communication and this bill does not grant big bro or private cos to have the encryption, so it is all flash and dazzle and no substance. It makes the uninformed feel good and the informed go "meh, stupid sheeple".

yes, you are more informed than all the lawyers who actually read the bill and understand it and were involved in the public debate. the government just passed a big brother bill legalizing spying on citizens by the government as a pr stunt. because cispa has really improved the publics view of the government.

@sprollmerflag - I unmuted you so I could see all your uninformed bullshit...

I may not be more informed on the legalese, but I am more informed on the technical aspects and how cyber terrorism is coordinated. After all, I'm a professional in the field and the lawyers are not. This is not the same as SOPA and PIPA and, as such, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, and the rest of the big sites are *for* this legislation - sites that went black over SOPA/PIPA. If properly implemented (and it will get some revisions in the Senate), the avergae citizen will have nothing to fear from this. First, it is voluntary on the part of the private companies. They are under no obligation to send information to the government. Second, it *prohibits* hacking to get the information, so encrypted data sent using SSL will be unread and PGP encrypted emails on web servers will be unread. Most IM apps use encryption to secure the data between sender and receiver, making the communications prtected from CISPA (and making IM the new defacto cyber attack communication method).

What it will allow is for someone who buys a shitload of hacking books and stuff off amazon or ebay to be checked out because the purchase history is not encrypted. But sites like 2600.com can just implement SSL security to prevent search engines from searching them and opt out of providing the government any info (which this allows) and all your 2600 communications will be secure and safe from prying eyes.

i am pretty sure it was already illegal to hack to, for example, read emails. in fact i think emails even had some legal protection beyond other internet communications. this bill (or is it a law now?) does not help people in any way on that front. it just legalizes the government's ability to gather all this information, which by the way they are already doing. so what will come of it is two things, legal cases will use personal information intercepted without consent because the government can now use it, and more importantly the government will be able to go to isps with data that would have before been illegally obtained in order to censor or block content or users.

you seem to buy the story that this is all about preventing terrorism or something, but it isn't. in fact most of this terrorism if it does exist is put up there by agents to justify further restricting internet freedom. that has to be the prime tactic of these people.

in fact it was funny they did research as to where all this intellectual property infringement was happening and the vast majority of it turned out to be coming from riaa servers.

You know nothing about the US government? It has passed the House. Still has to pass the Senate, have the two version reconciled and pass both the House and Senate again in reconciled form then be singed by the PResident to be law.

As far as your conspiracy theory that the government is hacking email already. PGP takes along time to crack with a lot of horsepower. By the time even the government got a message cracked, it would likely be so old that any attack would already have taken place or been scrubbed. "The machine" from "person of Interest" doesn't exist and Carnivore (which was used to sniff packets) had to be installed at an ISP and *still* couldn't crack PGP encryption. PGP had a bug in it back in the late 90s, but that got patched in 2000 and it is damn near impossible to decrypt without the private key and the recipient of the email is the only one has his private key.

I can feel my IQ points dropping. Time to remute sprollmerlfag.

well assange (operative or not) is quoted as saying encrypted emails are worse than unencrypted if you are trying to avoid them being read by the government because the government will flag encrypted emails as suspicious and read them.

the government can decrypt any of it. hate to break it to you.

Thank you gentlemen for your interest in this, an important issue. I would like to remind all of you that today is a fantastic day to call your Senator (as I have done) and let him know that you oppose CISPA.

Really, your opinion on this issue, one way or the other, will be much more meaningful if you take the time to place the call. Now is a terrific time!