(image Source: Digital Trends )

BY LUCAS GEISLER

Remember SOPA? The House Internet censorship bill that caused a public uproar and made Wikipedia and other sites so angry they shut down for a day?  Well, some people feel another bill is coming after the Internet.
 
The House will vote on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act , or CISPA, later this month.  The bill would allow the Director of National Intelligence to retrieve information from private online companies if they suspect a cyber threat.

But not everyone believes the bill is doing much protecting. The Center for Democracy and Technology says of CISPA …
 
“The bill creates a sweeping ‘cybersecurity exception’ to every single federal and state law, including key privacy laws…allowing private companies holding our private communications to share them with each, with the National Security Agency, and…all other agencies of the federal government.”

The bill has more than 100 sponsors in the House and is endorsed by 28 companies.  Among those companies is one that has plenty of private info — Facebook.  In a letter to the House of Representatives, Facebook’s public policy VP Joel Kaplan had this to say …

“Through timely sharing of threat information, both public and private entities will be able to more effectively combat malicious activity in cyberspace and protect consumers.”

But why would Facebook, a company that condemned SOPA, support a possible attack on protecting consumers? Jim Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology says …

“Those companies want help from the government in repelling attacks, and want to be able to share their own cybersecurity techniques and vulnerabilities with each other, but are likely not considering the company-to-government sharing that might be essentially required to receive the bill's benefits.”

Another concern with CISPA is its broad definition of cyber-threats, including any theft to intellectual property—one of SOPA’s main goals.  The Young Turks believe the vague nature of the bill is anything but accidental.

“The problem is they write these bills so broadly that they wind up not only protecting against cyber security threats, which are real, but of course wind up helping the government shut down websites that they’re not happy with.” (Video Source: Youtube/The Young Turks)