Update on U.S. online spying bill CISPA: The fight continues

Image from Kyz on Flickr

At OpenMedia.ca, we're working on your behalf with our international counterparts to safeguard the open, affordable, surveillance-free Internet. One of the threats we face is a controversial U.S. bill called CISPA—the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act.

We’ve written about CISPA before (check out posts here and here for some background); the long-and-short is that it’s a dangerous piece of legislation that puts our privacy rights at risk.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), CISPA would negate existing privacy laws and allow companies to share user data with the government without a court order. Additionally, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) told The Huffington Post that the bill’s definition of the data that can be shared with the government is overly broad, and the government would have the ability to use that information, for the most part, as it liked, including using it for criminal investigations without a warrant.

The latest news is that last week, the U.S. House of Representatives rushed through a vote on CISPA and passed it.

But pro-Internet voices were heard. The vote was far closer than anyone imagined—most Democrats and a couple dozen Republicans voted against CISPA—and President Barack Obama has threatened to veto CISPA.

To continue to battle CISPA, in addition to fighting Canada’s own online spying bill C-30, we’ve teamed up across borders with other pro-Internet groups and civil liberties organizations including the EFF and the ACLU. Our focus for this campaign is now on the U.S. Senate, which is expected to take up its own cybersecurity legislation in the coming weeks.

We know that if battles are lost elsewhere, threats to the Internet will land on our doorsteps as well. The Internet has no borders, so to succeed we need to take on these challenges together.

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