Cispa: the Big Brother Law

Yasha Harari once said, “As the Internet grows, the choice of massive online social networks dwindles, and with it, your right to keep private your psycho pink bunny outfit pics.” That may sound ridiculous but it’s very true. The government has been trying more and more different ways to introduce regulations to ensure the security of the internet. The current bill is CISPA, which was defeated once before. It has been returned completely unchanged and is so far being carried through. With all the amazing advancements in the technology we use to share information, that’s understandable. But are they going about it in the right way? Recently there have been pieces of legislation introduced like ACTA, SOPA, and PIPA that have had mixed responses from the public, and so far the opposition has been strongest. There are many who believe that these bills are doing more bad than good, particularly in the area of online privacy. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is mainly concerned with cyber threats. The purpose of this bills is to ultimately allow private businesses and the government to share information regarding said cyber threats. This means that any private company can share vase amounts of private and sensitive data collected from it’s customers with the United States government. It would be above any already active standing privacy laws, and it would not require any sort of removal of unnecessary, personally identifiable information from the aforementioned private data. Anything and everything a person does on the internet is a possible target, including emails, internet browsing, financial records and even medical records. This leaves any person on the internet to the possibility of endangerment of personal matters. Companies can also share sensitive items of information such as full names, phone numbers and home addresses from the data given to the government. Furthermore, the information being collected is considered proprietary,