Like all new laws this one will be sold one way and used another -- likely very expansionary -- way.
For example the Patriot Act was sold as a thing that would only be used to catch terrorists. It's total terrorist-catching prosecutions to date is trivial, zero to a few. But it's still getting used quite a bit.
I'm not saying that the people who got caught in many of those cases didn't do something wrong, nor am I saying that they should get away with no consequences. But I don't see how you can charge people with "terrorism" for doing decidedly non-terrorist things.
If the text of the bill doesn't matter, the text of every other privacy-related bill doesn't matter either, and we can skip all these pointless arguments and let them pass SOPA. After all, they're just going to use milk safety regulations to combat piracy.
It's not that the text of the bill is COMPLETELY irrelevant. It's that the big companies will use their newfound powers in ways that fall into a gray area in the bill and of course the government will choose not to prosecute them for doing so, or judges will allow it because it's a gray area and not EXPLICITLY disallowed.
Because CISPA's definition of a "cybersecurity" threat is too broad. One of the vague terms it employs is "unauthorized access" -- a term we have seen abused recently in the cases of Aaron Swartz and Weev.
My fear is that, like the PATRIOT act, CISPA will grant overly-broad powers to intelligence agencies that will be employed for general surveillance. My view is that any law that curtails liberty should do so minimally. I don't oppose fighting cybersecurity threats, but the bill needs work still.
You just made an argument that is directly contradicted by the text of the bill.
‘(B) EXCLUSION.— Such term does not
23 include information pertaining to efforts to gain
24 unauthorized access to a system or network of
25 a government or private entity that solely in
1 volve violations of consumer terms of service or
2 consumer licensing agreements and do not oth-
3 erwise constitute unauthorized access.
No, I was responding to the "unauthorized access" point in the parent comment. Since you can't be charged with a crime under CISPA at all, I'm not sure how your comment isn't a non sequitur.
