It’s likely you’ve never heard of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, also known as CISPA.  It is the latest round in the never-ending litany of SOPA-like bills designed to clamp down on the scourge that is the Internet.  And it just cleared the House last week by a pretty comfortable margin.  Comfortable that is, unless you’re a user of the Internet.

Much like the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, CISPA cloaks itself with a title that’s hard to be opposed to.  Cyber-terrorism is a very real threat, and who in their right mind would be against a measure to protect us from a cyber-attack?  Ahhh… if only it actually achieved that goal.

What CISPA actually does is provide immunity to ISPs and online  service providers for responding to government requests for information about the cyber-activities of anyone related to cybersecurity, cyber crime, protecting people from harm, protecting children from exploitation, and national security.  Note that the bill does not compel companies to turn over such information, and because it’s a voluntary request, it requires no court approval or any other sort of burden of reasonable cause.  But keep in mind that during the post 9/11 illegal wiretapping scandals, AT&T, Verizon, and other companies were only too willing to hand over your data.  So much so that there were efforts to prosecute the telecom companies for violating citizen’s rights, which ultimately required that the telcos be granted immunity.  Under CISPA, they will have permanent immunity as CISPA explicitly states that companies may provide requested information “notwithstanding any other provision of law.”  In other words, CISPA trumps all other laws.

CISPA would “waive every single privacy law ever enacted in the name of cybersecurity,” Rep. Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat and onetime Web entrepreneur, said during the House debate. “Allowing the military and NSA to spy on Americans on American soil goes against every principle this country was founded on.”

Yet all this begs the question, will it make us safer?  After all, in the last decade Americans have repeatedly shown that they are willing to sacrifice considerable freedoms in the interest of domestic security.

The fundamental issue would seem to be that this is a bill about cyber-security. Yet the allowances to deploy the law for purposes such as protecting children from exploitation seem pretty hard to defend as essential to preventing cyber-terrorism.  Still, it’s hard to argue that protecting children is a bad thing.

Moreover, the issue would seem to be the relative ease by which potential cyber-terrorists could thwart the efforts enabled by CISPA.  VPN tunnels and anonymous proxy services are well known technologies, and would make it impossible for anyone monitoring network traffic to even determine who was talking to whom, much less eavesdrop on the conversation.  You could certainly argue that the average citizen might not have the geeky skills to set up such a secure Internet connection.  But certainly anyone with the mad tech skills to conduct cyber-terrorism is going to be able to handle an encrypted network tunnel.  Don’tcha think?

So who are we catching here?  One possibility is that this is all just more security theater.  We’ll spend a lot of money and politicians will use CISPA as a campaign slogan, but it will have very little net impact on security.  Another possibility is that CISPA will be exploited for less noble purposes, unrelated to cyber-terrorism.  Instead of hunting down Chinese hackers, it will be used to hunt down your spouse streaming an illegally broadcast Celtics game on her laptop.

The bottom line is that this bill will not accomplish what it purports to.  The bill is highly focused on domestic surveillance, and there is no evidence that we are at risk of a domestic cyber-attack from citizens with poor tech skills.  Further, there are ample laws on the books now that allow the government a pretty wide berth to eavesdrop on citizens when they can show cause.  And those laws have already been routinely circumvented in the name of national security.  If anything, we need to be shoring up the Fourth Amendment, not tearing it to shreds.

Just because technology provides the means to unobtrusively invade our personal privacy does not mean we should be surrendering those rights.

Fortunately, while CISPA started out with bipartisan support, it has become a partisan issue.  It may have been passed by the House, but its chances of getting through the Senate are slim, and Obama has already threatened a veto.  Yet this is no time for complacency.  These sorts of bills just keep on coming, and sooner or later, one of them will slip through.

Be vigilant.

SOPA and PIPA may be dead, but the battle is far from over.  The dust had barely settled from the online community’s successful revolt against Hollywood’s attempt to toss out due process in an effort to protect it’s Luddite-like business model when Rep. Lamar Smith, SOPA’s author, introduced the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011.

That doesn’t even sound related does it?  Further, it’s obviously about protecting children, and who could be against that? Well, that’s kind of the point. The problem is, this bill doesn’t really introduce any additional protections for children or make any bold new strides to stamp out child porn.  At least not directly.

What the bill does require is that your ISP maintain a record of what IP addresses are assigned to you for 18 months.  It is required to keep those records sealed, unless the government, and only the government, requests them.

Some sites are reporting the bill requires ISPs to keep a record of every site you visit.  That’s not true, unless you live in Hawaii, where a separate and unrelated state bill has been proposed requiring your ISP to keep tabs on your every YouTube view and Facebook stalking venture.  The federal bill makes no such requirement.

This means the Fed won’t have the ability under this bill to demand your Internet history as part of an investigation.  But, if it is monitoring network traffic or if it seizes a web server and the logs on that server, they can trace your activity back to your house.

So in theory, FBI agents bust a child porn provider, find out that someone at the address 123.123.123.123 has been a heavy user, and grab the ISP records to find out that on the day in question, that address was assigned to your house.  Then you hear a knock on the door.  Okay, if you’re into child porn, then someone should knock at your door and haul your ass away.  But what if it wasn’t you?  What if your neighbor jacked your WiFi, and he’s the real pervert?  What if you own a coffee shop and provide free WiFi to your customers?  Are you now suspect because of their actions?

And you’d have to be completely naive to think this tactic only applies to child porn.  Gee, have you been to Megaupload or Pirate Bay lately?  And there’s the SOPA/PIPA tie in.  Once this data is being collected and is at the government’s disposal, it will be used for all manner of things.  This isn’t about protecting the children. That’s just the ruse to get the law passed.

And before someone argues that if you’ve got nothing to hide you shouldn’t be worried… that’s not the point.  The Forth Amendment guarantees a right to privacy.  The Supreme Court recently ruled that your car can’t be GPS tagged without a warrant.  This means the police can’t decide to electronically track and log wherever you go in the real world so that  just in case they uncover a crime, they can go back and see who was near the scene when it was committed.  The virtual world should not be different.

As ill-conceived as they were, SOPA and PIPA were at least upfront about their intentions and motivations.  Hiding behind the specter of child porn to erode constitutional rights is despicable.  The children deserve better.