THAT'S OK, I WASN'T USING MY CIVIL LIBERTIES ANYWAY...NOT!!!!!!! Isn't it amazing that this legislation is backed by the repiglicans and tea-baggers in Congress, the same people who rant and rave about government interference in our lives? Why the hypocrisy? Because they support laws that deny the people the power to challenge their corporate masters. This spying law will intimidate some to just accept their decrees, much like in a Third World dictatorship. Join FreePress and Save The Internet in demanding Congress defeat CISPA, tell the government to keep out of our lives. And check out this piece from the Washington Post......
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Want to give the federal government and big companies new powers to spy on you?
You’re in luck: There's a bill for that.
It's called CISPA — the "Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act" — and it's a frightening piece of legislation. It could allow for a new online spying regime, letting Big Brother read, watch and listen to everything we do on the Internet.
The bill could be up for a vote in the House in a matter of weeks.
We've shown that a mass outcry can help kill bad Internet bills. It's
time to do it again:
CISPA would allow companies and the government to bypass privacy
protections and share all sorts of information about what Americans do
online. The legislation makes it far easier for authorities to spy on
your email traffic, comb through your mobile texts, filter your online
content and even block access to popular websites.
It would have a chilling effect on free speech — creating an
environment in which we refrain from posting on Facebook, conducting Web
searches, sending emails, writing blog posts or communicating online
for fear that the National Security Agency — the same agency that’s been
conducting "warrantless wiretapping" online for years — could come
knocking.
If this bill passes, authorities won't have to worry about pesky
privacy laws getting in the way the next time they want to grab your
Facebook history or search through your email. All they'll need is the
vague sense that the information relates to a "cyber threat" — a poorly
defined concept in the bill. And you'll never know they shared that information.
CISPA’s broad language could lead all too easily to governmental and
corporate attacks on our right to speak freely online. And while there
is a real need to protect vital national interests from cyber attacks,
we can’t do it at the expense of our basic civil rights.
Opposition to CISPA is growing by the second. Take action now. Tell Congress to stop CISPA.
The Free Press Action Fund fights every day to protect our freedom to
access information and connect with others. CISPA would chill free
speech and pose an enormous threat to those essential freedoms.
Together we can stop it.
Thanks,
Josh, Tim, Matt, Kate and the rest of the Free Press Action Fund team
P.S. Like our work? The Free Press Action Fund is powered by
donations from people like you. We don’t take a single cent from
business, government or political parties. Please keep us going strong with a gift of $10 — or more — today. Thank you!
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Free Press is a national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media. Learn more at www.freepress.net.
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By Sari Horwitz and Ellen Nakashima The Obama administration has approved guidelines that allow
counterterrorism officials to lengthen the period of time they retain
information about U.S. residents, even if they have no known connection
to terrorism.
The changes allow the
National Counterterrorism Center
(NCTC), the intelligence community’s clearinghouse for terrorism data,
to keep information for up to five years. Previously, the center was
required to promptly destroy — generally within 180 days — any
information about U.S. citizens or residents unless a connection to
terrorism was evident.
The
new guidelines,
which were approved Thursday by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.,
have been in the works for more than a year, officials said.
The guidelines have prompted concern from civil liberties advocates.
Those
advocates have repeatedly clashed with the administration over a host
of national security issues, including its military detention without
trial of individuals in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, its
authorization of the killing
of U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, and its
prosecution of an unprecedented number of suspects in the leaking of
classified information.
Officials said the guidelines are aimed at
making sure relevant terrorism information is readily accessible to
analysts, while guarding against privacy intrusions. Among other
provisions, agencies that share data with the NCTC may negotiate to have
the data held for shorter periods. That information can pertain to
noncitizens as well as to “U.S. persons” — American citizens and legal
permanent residents.
The director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., has signed off on the changes.
“A
number of different agencies looked at these to try to make sure that
everyone was comfortable that we had the correct balance here between
the information-sharing that was needed to protect the country and
protections for people’s privacy and civil liberties,” said Robert S.
Litt, the general counsel in the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, which oversees the NCTC.
Although the guidelines
cover a variety of issues, the retention of data was the primary focus
of negotiations with federal agencies. Those agencies provide the center
with information such as visa and travel records and data from the FBI.
The
old guidelines were“very limiting,” Litt said. “On Day One, you may
look at something and think that it has nothing to do with terrorism.
Then six months later, all of a sudden, it becomes relevant.”
Since
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the government has taken steps
to break down barriers in information-sharing between law enforcement
and the intelligence community, but policy hurdles remain.
The
NCTC, created by the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention
Act, collects information from numerous agencies and maintains access to
about 30 data sets across the government. But privacy safeguards differ
from agency to agency, in some cases hindering timely and effective
analysis, senior intelligence officials said.
“We have been
pushing for this because NCTC’s success depends on having full access to
all of the data that the U.S. has lawfully collected,” said Rep. Mike
Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee. “I don’t
want to leave any possibility of another catastrophic attack that was
not prevented because an important piece of information was hidden in
some filing cabinet.”
The shootings at Fort Hood, Tex., and the
attempted downing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009 gave
new impetus to efforts to aggregate and analyze terrorism-related data
more effectively.
In the case of Fort Hood, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan
had had contact with Awlaki but that information had not been shared
across the government. The name of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the
suspect in the 2009 airliner plot, had been placed in a master list
housed at the NCTC but not on a terrorist watch list that would have
prevented him from boarding the plane.
Officials said the privacy
safeguards in the new guidelines include limits on the NCTC’s ability to
redistribute information to other agencies.
“Within the
intelligence community, there’s one set of controls for terrorism
purposes, a stricter set of controls for non-terrorism purposes, and an
even stricter set of controls for dissemination outside the intelligence
community,” an official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
An entire database cannot be shared; only specific information within
that data set can be shared, and it must be with the approval of the
agency that provided the data, the official said.
Privacy advocates said they were concerned by the new guidelines, despite the safeguards.
The
purpose of the safeguards is to ensure that the “robust tools that we
give the military and intelligence community to protect Americans from
foreign threats aren’t directed back against Americans,” said the
American Civil Liberties Union’s national security policy counsel,
Michael German. “Watering down those rules raises significant concerns
that U.S. persons are being targeted or swept up in these collection
programs and can be harmed by continuing investigations for as long as
these agencies hold the data.”
Other homeland security experts said the guidelines give officials more flexibility without compromising individual privacy.
“Five
years is a reasonable time frame,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former
senior Department of Homeland Security policy official. “I certainly
think 180 days was way too short. That’s just not a realistic
understanding” of how long it takes analysts to search large data sets
for relevant information, he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/new-counterterrorism-guidelines-would-permit-data-on-us-citizens-to-be-held-longer/2012/03/21/gIQAFLm7TS_print.html
