Reddit, Craigslist and 30,000 Other Websites Oppose CISPA

Reddit, Craigslist and more than 30,000 other websites are flying the flag of opposition to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, a controversial cybersecurity bill that was recently reintroduced in Congress.

The thousands of websites which oppose CISPA will, starting Tuesday, be displaying an interactive banner ad (seen below) from the Internet Defense League that allows voters to send the following message to their members of Congress: "CISPA is back. This bill sacrifices privacy without improving security. We deserve both."

"CISPA takes away people's 4th amendment right to privacy,” said Tiffiny Cheng of Fight for the Future and the Internet Defense League, an Internet activist organization which is organizing an anti-CISPA "Week of Action."

The Internet Defense League is a product of Fight for the Future and includes Mozilla, Wordpress, Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among other members.

"That's why internet users are going to do what they're good at; the Internet is good at fighting for itself and the rights of every user," continued Cheng. "We've been able to tailor our responses to the unique threats and opportunities to free expression and rights online, and we keep winning."

CISPA is designed to allow private companies and the government to share cybersecurity information with one another in an effort to bolster both sides' defenses against hackers. However, it has come under fire from Internet activists and privacy advocates, who fear it will allow the government to spy on Internet users — claims which are vehemently denied by the bill's authors.

CISPA passed the House of Representatives last year despite a veto threat from the White House on privacy grounds, but it was not picked up by the Senate. It has since been re-introduced in the new congressional term.

Grassroots Internet advocates successfully joined with some of the Internet's top companies, including Google and Facebook, to defeat SOPA in early 2012. However, several of the companies which opposed SOPA have been kinder to CISPA, arguing it could help them protect themselves and their users from hackers and data breaches.

While CISPA's fate remains uncertain, President Barack Obama in January signed an executive order which effectively put the less controversial half of CISPA's intelligence flow — the transfer of data from government agencies to private companies — into practice.

Source : mashable