CISPA Followup
In case you didn't hear - and unless you were very motivated, you probably didn't - CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, was defeated in the Senate by a vote of 52-46.
Grassroots efforts to defeat the bill launched email campaigns designed to bring techies up to speed on what Congress was trying to do, and hoped that they would call or write their Senators, objecting to the bill. A followup to SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), nay-sayers feared that any such act that allowed the government a foot in the door of the Internet could result in the end of its free-wheeling ways, which users have come to love.
Cognoscenti are sure that wasn't the last salvo, however, and feel that the act's defeat was mainly Congress going quiet during an election year over a very controversial subject.
While none of us would openly admit to wanting Internet piracy, or black hat hacking to continue, the opposite side of that coin is control--and as we've seen from attempts to make flying safer, it usually only results in inconvenience to the innocent at their own expense.
Grassroots efforts to defeat the bill launched email campaigns designed to bring techies up to speed on what Congress was trying to do, and hoped that they would call or write their Senators, objecting to the bill. A followup to SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), nay-sayers feared that any such act that allowed the government a foot in the door of the Internet could result in the end of its free-wheeling ways, which users have come to love.
Cognoscenti are sure that wasn't the last salvo, however, and feel that the act's defeat was mainly Congress going quiet during an election year over a very controversial subject.
While none of us would openly admit to wanting Internet piracy, or black hat hacking to continue, the opposite side of that coin is control--and as we've seen from attempts to make flying safer, it usually only results in inconvenience to the innocent at their own expense.
Comments