There’s a rush going on in Washington DC right now. It has been going on for over 2 years now and will continue until they get something done. The topic – cybersecurity. The latest failed legislation – CISPA. US News is reporting that the US Senate will not take up the cybersecurity bill but will draft different legislation to go after cybersecurity – and some would say our privacy as well – in the coming months. Their biggest concern according to Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WVa) is that the bill’s “privacy protections are insufficient.” This echoes President Barack Obama’s sentiment and is the reason…

SOPA was a black eye for the US government. Nothing in the last few decades can compare to the complete turnaround Washington DC had to make once the people of the internet and websites across the web made their opposition to the bill known back in January, 2012. Now, the politicians and other entities have learned from their mistakes. This time, they have been able to pull off the unthinkable. They have successfully pulled the wool over the eyes of the American people. The public outrage that stopped SOPA has been replaced by solemn acceptance by some, disinterest from others, and a complete lack…

We thought that the nonsense was behind us when we stopped SOPA. The only thing we really did was teach Washington and the supporters in the technology world that if they want to destroy our privacy, they have to ease into it with more subtlety. Thus, CISPA was born. We will go into much more detail about it in the very near future, but for now it’s important to note that companies that did not support SOPA (at least openly) have quietly thrown their support over to CISPA. According to RT: A lobbying organization that counts Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and other tech giants among its clients has lent…

Before anyone starts chanting that the conspiracy theorists were bound to find something in the Cybersecurity Executive Order to attack for the sake of attacking, keep one thing in mind. I like the order as a whole. In many ways, it’s pretty impotent and stays in line with what privacy activists (myself included) had hoped for – a one-way street of information sharing that will allow public and private entities involved in critical infrastructure to better defend themselves. My hope was that the sharing would be even deeper, that there would be more tangible ways that the government could educate…

The internet was all abuzz about SOPA and PIPA and proved a worthy foe against government oppression by quashing the bills before they could get too much momentum. There is outrage now about CISPA, the latest aromaticity that Washington has put forth to attack its people and protect its interests, but there has been a much lower level of outrage despite being potentially more dangerous than its predecessors. Why? The answer is actually two-fold. First, the power of the people that helped to kill SOPA/PIPA was assisted by the power of big business. Those who stood in support of the bills were punished…