© Credit: C-SPANHouse members during last year's floor debate on CISPA (clockwise from top left): Jared Polis, who warned it would "waive every single privacy law ever enacted"; Adam Schiff; Sheila Jackson Lee; Hank Johnson; Mike Rogers; Jan Schakowsky
A petition to the White House asking the president to "stop" a controversial cybersecurity bill passes the 100,000 mark. The only problem: President Obama has already threatened to veto it.It's not exactly a secret where President Obama stands on a controversial Republican-backed cybersecurity bill: he's already
promised to veto it.
But a cadre of Internet activists opposed to the
Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act nevertheless
created a petition to the president asking him to "stop CISPA" -- and it has crossed the 100,000-signature threshold necessary to secure a response from the administration.
In reality, there's little Obama can do to stop CISPA that he hasn't already done. The administration offered a stark warning in last year's veto threat, which talked up a competing Democrat-backed bill and predicted CISPA "will undermine the public's trust in the government as well as in the Internet by undermining fundamental privacy, confidentiality, civil liberties, and consumer protections."
CISPA is controversial because it overrules all existing federal and state laws by saying "notwithstanding any other provision of law," companies may share information "with any other entity, including the federal government." It would not, however, require them to do so.
That language has alarmed dozens of advocacy groups, including the American Library Association, the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Reporters Without Borders, which sent a letter (
PDF) to Congress on Monday opposing CISPA. It says: "CISPA's information sharing regime allows the transfer of vast amounts of data, including sensitive information like Internet records or the content of e-mails, to any agency in the government."
Comment: Another clue that the psychopathic elites don't care one whit for the well-being of ordinary people. These ridiculous bonuses are occurring at a time when millions of people are jobless, record numbers of people are in poverty and one in four children in the US are on food stamps.
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