CISPA gets a rewrite but still threatens privacy and freedom of speech

Numerous civil rights groups - including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and Reporters Without Borders - announced Monday that they were launching a "Stop Cyber Spying" week of protests against CISPA, before a scheduled House of Representatives vote on the bill next week.

• Even worse than SOPA: New CISPA cybersecurity bill will censor the Web
• CISPA Is the New SOPA: Help Kill It This Week
• CISPA Bill: 5 Main Privacy Worries

CISPA demolishes existing barriers between the government and the private sector - and between government agencies, including the military - that restrict casual data sharing. It would effectively allow information about Americans' use of the Internet to slosh back and forth uninhibited. The Center for Democracy and Technology says, "CISPA has a very broad, almost unlimited definition of the information that can be shared with government agencies and it supersedes all other privacy laws."

Corporations like Facebook (Facebook is a staunch supporter of the CISPA Bill) could share information about their users with other corporations and the government.

David Segal at Huff Post:

the profit motive is causing Facebook to support CISPA, at the expense of its users, because it would [...] provide attractive immunities for the company.

From RT:

the vague verbiage contained within the pages of the paper could allow Congress to circumvent existing exemptions to online privacy laws and essentially monitor, censor and stop any online communication that it considers disruptive to the government or private parties.

You can join nearly 150,000 other Internet users by using Demand Progress's action page to urge your lawmakers to oppose CISPA. Internet users were able to push GoDaddy to withdraw its support of SOPA. Now it's time to make sure Facebook knows we're furious.