The UK already has SOPA.

United Kingdom internet service providers must block The Pirate Bay, that nation’s High Court said Monday.

Most people in the UK don't really understand this. It did not come about because of legislation pushed by the Copyright Power. It started as an anti-child pornography measure. The scope creep to copyright occurred this summer as a consequence of a court decision.

British ISPs Ordered to Block The Pirate Bay | Threat Level | Wired.com

At places like Transparency Camp, we're glimpsing the emergence of a new culture, one that isn't inherently out to "Fight the Man" or disassociate itself from the mainstream of society, but that is aimed at making democracy and government work better. For the fun of it, you might say that this counterculture is a "count culture." It's powered by our ability to count everything (data); our ability to publish to the web (what you say can count); and a desire to make sure that everyone counts as full members of society.

Matthew Hall, a political science student from Southwestern University in Texas, said, "In political science, we study what's wrong with government, not how to fix it. Here we're looking at ways to fix it."

The Rise of the Count(er) Culture: Notes on Transparency Camp 2012 | TechPresident

It appears that the project is a casualty of both bad luck and the recent recession, having its funding cut off from foundations such as the Pew Charitable Trusts and the MacArthur Foundation. But it also took a major financial hit in 2009 when the JEHT Foundation, one of its major backers with a focus on civics, shut down because most of its endowment was tied up in Bernie Madoff's fraudulent hedge fund...

"I think if we're going to have a hope of combating the influence of political advertising, it will be through building good, objective sources of information that people can turn to," says Tom Cross, a computer security researcher in Atlanta, Georgia, who's been using Project Vote Smart's APIs to build an experimental voter guide to regional and local politicians called the Wiki Voter Guide. "We can use the Internet to build better information resources, but in order to do that, some of the basic data about who is running for office where needs to be made available in an open format that people can access, experiment with, and build on top of."

Project VoteSmart does important work for Democracy. You can help by donating.

Project Votesmart was ripped off by Madoff

On Monday, February 06, 2012, the Supreme Court of Georgia issued its ruling in the case Cardinale v. City of Atlanta et al., ruling that the Georgia Open Meetings Act indeed requires the listing of the names of those voting against a proposal or abstaining, even in the case of a non-roll-call vote.

The present writer filed a pro se lawsuit against the City of Atlanta...

Pro se means he did not use a lawyer to do this - awesome!

Supreme Court Bans Secret Votes across State of Georgia

Computer networks in the United States are under attack by sophisticated, state sponsored attackers. These attackers are spying on our strategic plans and stealing our technology. They do not only target government systems and networks, but private organizations as well. It is a very serious problem that could have long term strategic implications for our national security.

Traditional computer security controls have a hard time keeping up with these attackers, as they have developed attack techniques that evade those controls - they know about security vulnerabilities that are unpatched, for example. The U.S. Government has information about these threats that it uses to protect federal systems and networks. Private organizations are also targeted, and could benefit from having access to this information. The information consists of signatures for intrusion prevention systems, which look on the wire for indicators of attack.

The basic purpose of CISPA is to allow the federal government to share classified intrusion prevention signature information with people who work for private organizations and have government security clearances. I do not know why a new law is necessary in order to allow for this, but the fact is that this kind of information sharing may be important for protecting our computer systems and networks. CISPA also allows those private organizations to share information back to the government. That, I think, it where the trouble lies.

When this law was first proposed, civil liberties groups equated it with SOPA. SOPA had to do with creating a blacklist of foreign web sites that Americans are not allowed to view. CISPA has to do with protecting computer networks from attack. These are completely different motives, and conflating the two in order to rally the general public against CISPA seemed to me to be manipulative at best.

The reason that civil liberties groups are concerned about CISPA is language stating that this information sharing is authorized notwithstanding any other law - meaning the government could use these intrusion prevention systems to look for anything that could be rationalized to fit within CISPA's definition of cyber security threats, without a warrant.

One reason, I suspect, for the "notwithstanding" language is that intrusion prevention systems are prone to false positives. Organizations that receive these classified signatures aren't likely to know exactly what the signatures are REALLY supposed to be looking for. Classified information sharing has a tendency to be minimalistic. When one of these signatures fires, the organization running the signature will probably have little choice but to take a packet capture of the network session it fired on and hand that capture over the government. The government would have to examine that capture and determine whether or not this was really an attack or just... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

Below is a discussion of some of the issues I (and others) had with the original version and how the new amendments address (or fail to address) these issues.

A good discussion of the CISPA amendments.

Can Last-Minute Amendments Redeem the Troubling Cybersecurity Bill? - Alexander Furnas - Technology - The Atlantic

The government would only be able to use the information to protect against a cyber attack, investigate cyber crime, protect national security, protect against theft or bodily harm or to protect minors from child pornography.

In other words, CISPA enables and is intended to enable surveillance of the Internet for domestic law enforcement purposes that are unrelated to cybersecurity.

House to amend cybersecurity bill, privacy group sees 'good progress' - The Hill's Hillicon Valley

More later...

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DiskJokke - Interpolation - YouTube

:-)

Bubbles on Hockey Night in Canada - YouTube