By: Dmitriy Starkov
Technology permeates every day of our lives. Everyone from college students and business professionals uses technology to further their efforts in studying, communicating with one another, and posting information on blogs. With advances in technology come the advances in ways that people can use technology in malicious ways. This requires the creation of certain protection measures to prevent people from getting harmed. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) aims to do just that. This act aims to make it easy for the U.S. government to investigate cyber threats and fight against cyber attacks. Sounds pretty good, right? We all want to be protected from cyber attacks, but this will come at a heavy cost. The bill would accomplish its anti-cyber terrorism mission by allowing the sharing of information between technology companies and the government.
Companies that support this bill include Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple, all giants in the technological world. This means that the government would have access to information that these technological giants handle. All information submitted to these corporations could potentially, and very easily, end up in government hands. In the excerpts we have read from Gilliom and Monahan, they explore the idea of the surveillant assemblage, a concept that urges us to think about surveillance as threading "through the many dimensions of our lives" as opposed to the Big Brother/Panopticon idea that there is a big entity watching us all the time. CISPA is very broadly written in that it does not specify exactly how your information may be used by the government. According to an informative write up on the issue by PCMAG, CISPA is broad enough to provide for the sharing of personal information such as text messages, e-mails, and information stored on a cloud device. Technology companies like Facebook have said that if it would help fight cyber terrorism, they would be glad to share information with the government creating the possibility that this information would be accessible to the military as well. With no measures of limiting this practice or any other control measures in sight, is it possible for our information society to move toward a Big Brother approach? While that is unlikely, it is important to think critically about what this type of legislation might mean.
In the schematic of the information society outlined by Gillom an Monahan, CISPA would greatly increase the surveillance capabilities of the government. We already knew from our studies in this class and previous blog posts that we are constantly being tracked by companies like Apple and Facebook. With CISPA it is possible that the government will be able to access all of this information which is a concern of privacy rights. US courts have already said that it is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment to access digital information if there is evidence of illegal activity. There is no way to know what kind of safeguards there are to prevent abuse of the system proposed by CISPA, which is part of the reason why so many people are opposed to it.
Further Reference: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/12/business/la-fi-cybersecurity-bill-20130413
No comments:
Post a Comment