Helios, LLC

June 1st 2012 - Reading the tech news headlines some days is a bit like trying to decipher some strange new language. Of course technology has always had more than its share of acronyms but some actually make their way into common parlance. The acronyms in the headlines in recent months have been in relation to various bills which have been introduced in the U.S. government which are aimed to provide more security across the internet. While the intention is noble, the approaches often are not. Much of the problem harkens back to an article I wrote a few months ago which explains why government legislation struggles to address issues of technology. Technology simply advances too swiftly for legislation to keep up. Knowing this, the obstacle legislators continually attempt to overcome is the tendency to try to overreach in the breadth of a bill’s language which then drives criticism from the bill’s detractors. Beginning in 2011, two separate bills were introduced: SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) in the Congress and PIPA (PROTECT IP Privacy) in the Senate. Both were written to give enhanced tools to law enforcement to pursue and shut down rogue website operators who illegally share copyrighted information including but not limited to music, video and software. Although neither bill passed, the government effectively demonstrated that it already has sufficient tools to execute the ambitions of these bills when with the help of several foreign governments they shut down MegaUpload, one of the most prolific online file hosting sites for trafficking copyrighted materials. So if the U.S. government already has the power, what was the need for additional laws? This is where much of the contention arose because the language of the bills included not only pirated media but also digital print media. This means that anyone could make a copyright claim to a digital work and impose unnecessarily severe legal ramifications on any website which used that work. Sites like Wikipedia are a massive collaboration of contributed works and the implication of such a law is that anyone who previously contributed to a Wikipedia entry could subsequently claim copyright ownership of their submission, essentially undermining the entire work of the site. Even citing a digital article on another website could bring down the wrath of the copyright holder with full legal repercussions. This is why so many leading websites and technology industry leaders came out against the bills. They don’t support copyright infringement but they could plainly see the potential fallout of a poorly-worded law. CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) is now making its way through the legislative system, and while it hasn’t garnered the kind of media firestorm of its predecessors, it is not without its own critics. Instead of the tech community though, the primary critics of CISPA are privacy and consumer advocacy groups. CISPA empowers various federal law enforcement agencies to share information about consumers with each other and with companies involved in providing services to those consumers. This supersedes mere wiretap rules and consumer privacy protections by indemnifying companies like an internet service provider from not only cooperating with federal law enforcement investigations but actually initiating such an investigation by volunteering confidential consumer information deemed suspicious. Essentially, if your ISP thinks you’re engaged in illicit activity online, they need only inform authorities and an investigation can ensue without warning. No notification, no due process, just the tools to equip a technocratic authoritarian regime to secretly monitor citizens’ online activities. This is the unintended outcome that online privacy advocates fear. It’s hard to say where this bill will be by the time you are reading this but to date the White House has expressed its own reservations about the language of the CISPA bill. Chances are if it has to go through more revisions and debate in both houses, it will not become a law in the current session.

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