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TMCNet: EDITORIAL: Congress tinkering with Internet again

[March 21, 2012]

EDITORIAL: Congress tinkering with Internet again

Mar 21, 2012 (Sun Journal - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- Congress just won't leave the Internet alone. In January, online companies such as Wikipedia and Google organized people to protest two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House of Representatives and the Protect Intellectual Property Act in the Senate. SOPA and PIPA would have allowed the government easily to shut down websites accused of violating intellectual-property protections.

At the time, Jim Harper, director of information and policy studies at the Cato Institute, observed that Congress would cook up something similar. He warned, "They perhaps want to teach the public a lesson. You don't tell them what to do. They tell you what to do." The new mischief is HR3523, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011, by Rep. Mike J. Rogers, R-Mich. Weren't Republicans put back in charge of the House in November 2010 by an electorate that demanded less government? According to the summary by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, HR3523 "would let companies spy on users and share private information with the federal government and other companies with near-total immunity from civil and criminal liability. It effectively creates a 'cybersecurity' exemption to all existing laws." That means Google, Facebook or your phone company could collect your emails or phone messages for "cybersecurity purposes" -- broadly defined -- and share your information with other companies and government agencies.

According to a recent update by Harper: "The upshot is that no law applies" to what government and companies can do with your information. "That has sent me through the roof. It would create a legal-free zone." He explained that HR3523 is a bit different from the bills spiked in January, which involved disabling websites. HR3523 allows almost unlimited snooping.

Harper said that intelligence and police agencies already can obtain warrants to snoop on people, as required by Fourth Amendment. For example, police can obtain a warrant to snoop on a suspected terrorist. Unfortunately, the USA Patriot Act and other laws already have made it easier to snoop on people without a warrant.

But HR3523 would go much further. "Cybersecurity is thousands of different problems," according to Harper. "And Congress doesn't know what they are. They don't know what the information or what the law is. So, they write a new law that is extremely broad in defining cybersecurity." Broad laws are the definition of tyranny. The American Revolution was fought, in part, to prevent them.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason early in 1776, explained why free Americans rejected a specific British tyranny, stipulating, "That general warrants, whereby any officer or messenger may be commanded to search suspected places without evidence of a fact committed, or to seize any person or persons not named, or whose offense is not particularly described and supported by evidence, are grievous and oppressive." ___ (c)2012 the Sun Journal (New Bern, N.C.) Visit the Sun Journal (New Bern, N.C.) at http://www.newbernsj.com Distributed by MCT Information Services

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