CISA: The new security law doesn't help security

[think]

CISA: The new security law doesn't help security

By Caroline Craig - InfoWorld | Oct 30, 2015

The Senate this week overwhelmingly passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, a surveillance bill that festered in Congress for four years masquerading as security legislation. CISA will succeed in putting a lot more personal information about citizens into the hands of government. Given the feds' poor track record in safeguarding its own systems, does that knowledge make you feel more secure?

Against the advice of security experts, major tech companies, law professors, civil rights advocates, and consumer groups, U.S. senators voted 74 to 21 in support of CISA. (Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders voted against the bill, while Republican candidates Marc Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul were all absent.)

They rejected commonsense privacy amendments that would have made the bill less awful. "Despite protestations that CISA was not a surveillance bill, co-sponsors Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein discouraged their colleagues from voting for amendments to mitigate what senators called unreasonable invasions of privacy, including one notifying citizens that their data was being examined," said The Guardian.

They rejected commonsense privacy amendments that would have made the bill less awful. "Despite protestations that CISA was not a surveillance bill, co-sponsors Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein discouraged their colleagues from voting for amendments to mitigate what senators called unreasonable invasions of privacy, including one notifying citizens that their data was being examined," said The Guardian...

Read more:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2999476/government/cisa-new-security-law-doesnt-help-security.html

[Octafish]

1. Optics

More government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.

Everybody else is just renting.

Thanks for the heads-up on the mislabeled "Brave New World Order Thing Act," think.

[think]

2. Thanks Octafish. I always read and enjoy your posts. I learn a great deal.

[Octafish]

3. You are most welcome, think! Sharing information and news is a big part of being a Democrat.

That's why CISA and secret government are antithetical to democracy:

Camp Clark and the Demise of Free Speech

by JASON HIRTHLER
CounterPunch, SEPTEMBER 9, 2015

The threat of terrorism is being used to destroy the threat of democracy. I say threat of democracy because we live in a corporate oligarchy, as academics at Princeton feel compelled to point out once a year or so. The threat of terrorism is especially useful in achieving the oligarchy’s ultimate purpose—turning America into a full-blown corporate totalitarian state, with the hollow institutions of democracy simply serving as a colorful façade behind which operate the levers of private profit. George Orwell agreed: “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by Force or Fraud.” A decade and a half into the 21st century, the corporate project is almost complete. The corporations are nearly unassailable. They are legal persons. Their capital is free speech. Their bribes are written into law. They have crushed labor. They own Washington. All that remains is to wipe out the remaining threats. The ideological aims of the corporate state are simple: it must remove all barriers to corporate profit. Adam Smith summed it up centuries ago by describing “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind, all for ourselves and nothing for other people.”

Much like the absurd fear of communism before it, the threat of terrorism is used primarily to reduce the sphere of intellectual freedom, which in turn prevents ideological challenges to the reigning doctrinal system. Legislation, whether freshly proposed or already cemented in law, is the tool by which the fear of terror is used to restrict our freedoms and—importantly—intimidate the masses into perversions of self-censorship by which they constrict the ambit of their own reason, not for fear of terror, but for fear of the state that professes to defend them from terror. All dissenters must be either indoctrinated, imprisoned or exiled. Silenced in one fashion or another. Our quisling media may sound a tepid alarm or two, but they will finally fall in lockstep with the corporate will.

Quarantine the Traitors

A fine example of the snowball of corporate totalitarianism picking up heft and speed is an interview in July with retired General Wesley Clark. A Clintonite who may one day serve in Hillary Clinton’s White House, Clark gave an interview to MSNBC in the aftermath of the July Chattanooga shooting and promptly told America that, “if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn’t say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war.”

The domestic internment camps of World War Two are one of the worst American legacies of that war, along with crushing socialist uprisings in Europe to ward off Soviet influence there. Evidently Clark doesn’t think camps are such a bad thing. He’d like to bring them back to help us deal with the apparently rampaging threat of Muslim extremism.

“If these people are radicalized and they don’t support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States as a matter of principle, fine. It’s their right and it’s our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.”

Clark makes no mention of the undeniable fact that decades of unnecessary and cynical American wars in the Middle East have produced the extremism that now has Clark recommending extreme measures. The extremism that now spills beyond the borders of its desert wasteland and discomfits complacent European consumers by killing handfuls of them every few months. Western consumers, oblivious to history and the causes of Islamic extremism, march in pious protest, declaiming their rights and maintaining silent rectitude about their own complicity in slaughter.


SNIP...

But let’s not be cavalier about the ease with which our freedoms are being summarily stolen. These kinds of measures need a legal basis. It was the social psychologist Alex Carey who described how the 20th century corporate strategy to repress the popular will transitioned over time from pure violence to propaganda to propaganda plus legislation. For example, the corporate-friendly Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 was a response to the labor-friendly Wagner Act of 1935. Rest assured, plenty of the corporate state’s totalitarian henchmen are diligently working on the legislative angle. Clark isn’t going it alone in his maniacal calls to shred free speech on the threadbare rationale of security.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/09/camp-clark-and-the-demise-of-free-speech/

As long as there are two of us, think, democracy has a fighting chance.