CISPA: The End of Internet Privacy?

CISPA is a bill that 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 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has noted. “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.”

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According to its co-author Rep. Mike Rogers, CISPA already has enough votes to pass the House on Friday and despite an onslaught of new amendments, some of which actually make the bill worse for privacy, will head to the Senate for approval before awaiting the President’s signature.

In this recently released report, "The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 3523, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, in its current form," Obama's Office of Management and Budget said in a statement. "If H.R. 3523 were presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill." 

Given what we learned from Obama’s NDAA bait-and-switch, the President probably “can’t wait” to sign CISPA into law, formally empowering the federal government to use the Internet as one giant world wide wiretap in the name of cybersecurity.

Source - PrisonPlanet
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Profile Pics on Social Media Sites Pose Privacy Risk

Facial recognition tech makes it easier to combine offline, online identities

(Computerworld) - LAS VEGAS -- Imagine walking down a street and having a total stranger being able to instantly pull up your name, date of birth, Social Security number, your last blog item and other data on their smart phone.

That could soon happen, said Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of IT and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College.

In a presentation at the Black Hat conference here this week, Acquisti demonstrated how it's becoming easier for strangers to identify people and infer detailed information about them from their publicly available images on sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

The trend has "ominous implications for privacy," Acquisti said. "I'm here to raise awareness of what I feel is going to happen." (Read more)