Cyber bills legislate for mass
surveillance; Former Cybersecurity Czar calls for
Homeland Security data “customs inspections”
Steve Watson
Infowars.com
April 5, 2012
Consider here that the Obama Administration could take away
all free speech on the Internet so that the Gospel can not flow to Muslim
countries. Likewise this administration could also seek to block texts on freedom and capitalism not allowing them to go to communist and
socialist nations. As well as seek to strike out anything said concerning Homosexuals and LGBT concerning the gospel and their sinful lifesyles. We saw decades ago that the
Internet would become a national security issue, but with the marxist dictatorial
tendencies, as well as the pro-muslim, and pro-homosexual tendencies
of this administration there could well be a Net-Purge of conservatism and Christianity. An Internet Cyber-Data
Burning of anything
this Administration does not like.
In a New York Times editorial, former
government cybersecurity czar Richard A. Clarke has
called for the creation of customs checks on all data leaving and entering
Clarke makes the call in relation to Chinese
hackers stealing information and intellectual property from US firms.
“If given the proper authorization, the
“If government agencies were authorized to create a
major program to grab stolen data leaving the country, they could drastically
reduce today’s wholesale theft of American corporate secrets.”
While Clarke may well be coming at this subject
well intentioned, the fact that government has a long history of attempting to
crackdown on internet freedom and control the web will mean his words are a
cause of concern for many.
“Under Customs authority, the Department of
Homeland Security could inspect what enters and exits the
“And under the Intelligence Act, the president
could issue a finding that would authorize agencies to scan Internet traffic
outside the
We have seen with the recent attempts to pass
legislation such as SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA, that the federal
government is hell bent on skirting around legal oversight in order to seize
more control over web content and communications.
While those particular bills have more of a focus
on copyright protection, there is a huge move afoot to use the issue of cybersecurity as a means to crack down on the free
internet.
The Obama administration is going all out to muster
support in Congress for a bipartisan cybersecurity bill
co-sponsored by Republican Senator Susan Collins and Independent
Senator Joseph Lieberman and Democratic Senators Jay Rockefeller and Dianne
Feinstein.
Critics contend that the bill contains several
provisions that represent a sweeping power grab on behalf of the federal
government.
A measure recently added to the bill by Collins and
Lieberman, and supported by Obama, would empower the Department of Homeland
Security to conduct “risk assessments” of private companies in sectors deemed
critical to
ISPs AT&T and Comcast have denounced the
provision, declaring that federal oversight will stifle innovation.
“Such requirements could have an unintended
stifling effect on making real cybersecurity
improvements,” Edward Amoroso, chief security officer for Dallas-based
AT&T, said in testimony at a recent hearing. “Cyber adversaries are dynamic
and increasingly sophisticated, and do not operate under a laboriously defined
set of rules or processes.”
As we have previously reported, the bill originally
legislated for an Internet ‘kill switch’ that would allow the President to shut
down parts of the Internet in an emergency.
There are a whole host of other cybersecurity
bills in the works including a GOP bill, co-sponsored by John
McCain known as The Secure IT Act, and a newly introduced GOP bill known as The
Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), sponsored by Michigan
Republican Mike Rogers.
All of the bills have the same vague wording and do
not clearly define what a cybersecurity threat is.
This has prompted groups such as The Electronic Freedom Foundation and The
Center for Democracy and Technology to speak out about what they see as
legislating for broad information sharing between private companies and the
government for ill-defined purposes.
“The Rogers bill gives companies a free pass to
monitor and collect communications and share that data with the government and
other companies, so long as they do so for ‘cybersecurity
purposes,’” the EFF said in a blog post. “Just invoking ‘cybersecurity
threats’ is enough to grant companies immunity from nearly all civil and
criminal liability, effectively creating an exemption from all existing law.”
Kendall Burman of the
Center for Democracy and Technology spoke about CISPA in an interview with RT:
“We have a number of concerns with something like
this bill that creates sort of a vast hole in the privacy law to allow
government to receive these kinds of information.”
Burman added that the
bill, as it stands, allows the
Both the EFF and the CDT have noted that CISPA effectively
legislates for monitoring and collecting online communications without the
knowledge of the parties concerned and funneling them directly to the National
Security Agency or the DOD’s Cybercommand.
Essentially all of these bills legislate for moves
by the federal government to access and monitor the online communications of
all Americans, much like the more open agenda of the British government to snoop on
citizens.
With the additional ongoing construction of a city
sized secret NSA
data collection center in the Utah desert, about which the agency
will not even give details to Congress about, it is clear that the powers that
be fully expect to go ahead with such plans, with or without the legislation to
do so.