Techdirt

This week, we looked at the story of Laura Poitras, who sued the government to find out why she was detained every time she flew anywhere. In one instance, she was denied use of a pen, lest it serve as a weapon, prompting one anonymous commenter to win first place for insightful by underlining the oblivious irony of this move:

Five Years Ago This week in 2010, we had lots of followups on stories from last week and other recent developments. We took a closer look at the constitutional analysis of the huge copyright awards in the Tenenbaum case, and saw the first post-Bilski patent appeal reject a software patent. Meanwhile, UK newspapers were responding to Prince's bizarre anti-internet rant, and Larry Lessig was responding to ASCAP's anti-Creative Commons stance by challenging the boss to a debate. The RIAA was up to all sorts of nonsense, too. Despite the recording industry being in freefall, the association's bosses were getting huge raises; perhaps that's no surprise from an organization with such wacky, self-serving accounting that even major label musicians rarely make money. Then again, some back-of-the-envelope math shows that the RIAA spent $17.6-million on lawsuits to get $391,000 in settlements. As for the voices in the crowd, they were mixed: though the composer who spent last week debating a teenager was sticking to his guns about filesharing, former Pink Floyd manager Peter Jenner was admitting that it can't be stopped; and at least one record label head was looking towards a future where artists and labels embark on joint ventures. The WSJ was highlighting the problems of 'permission culture', while more people were beginning to realize that copyright serves middlemen, not creators. On the ACTA front, EU negotiators were presenting the deal to parliament... in secret to the point that even US intellectual property groups were getting nervous. The negotiators ignored their promises of transparency and made no move towards releasing a draft publicly, but of course that didn't matter because it was immediately leaked, teaching us a lot of interesting details. Brazil, meanwhile, was looking at copyright reform that would impose penalties for hindering fair use or the public domain, while we were looking at the possibility of Bolivia opting out of Berne and WIPO altogether. Ten Years Ago Hot on the heels of the Grokster ruling, this week in 2005 the recording industry was already pushing to expand (and abuse) the definition of inducement. It was also pushing the line that piracy is dominated by organized crime syndicates, who apparently still offer better service than the legal Napster foisted upon (and ignored by) university students. Perhaps they'd soon declare Amazon a syndicate too, what with it moving into the on-demand DVD printing world. In the Netherlands, at least, ISPs were saved from having to hand info over to the industry, though in Australia a judge decided that even linking to MP3s is illegal. In a long-anticipated test of all sorts of internet law, the Internet Archive was sued after material from it was used as evidence in a lawsuit. Of course, Canada appeared to be considering a new law that would effectively ban the Internet Archive (not to mention Google) altogether. Fifteen Years Ago Five years before Napster was legal, crappy and being foisted upon students, it was in a nebulous zone between lawsuits. Musicians were complaining about it with a national advertising campaign, while its famed enemy Lars Ulrich was making his case to Congress — but both seemed to be missing the point. At the same time, despite all this and its legal woes, Napster's traffic was up. Many people would say we still haven't totally figured out cellphone etiquette today, so you can imagine the conversation in 2000. To paraphrase an old saying, "we can put a living capsule into orbit, but we can't figure out how to use cellphones politely?" (Of course, regarding that, we were also realizing that living in space is dangerous in more ways than one.) Also in 2000: people were grappling with the definition of the (now-chic) geek, searching for yourself online was still considered egotistical, cutting-edge gaming industry technology was being applied in lots of other places, and of course we had the obligatory concerns about internet dependancy. Forty-Seven Years Ago In the history of computing, it's impossible to deny the pivotal role that Intel has played. I'd estimate that about 99% of everything I've ever done on any kind of computer has involved an Intel chip, and that's true for a lot of people. Well, it was today in 1968 that Intel Corporation was founded in Mountain View, California.

The last several weeks have focused on tech and gadgets, but this week we're taking a break from that to look at a project I know will interest a lot of folks here at Techdirt. Instead of running down "The Good" and "The Bad", let's just explore why the new crowdfunded book Made With Creative Commons could be a great addition to the conversation about culture in the digital age. For years, we've repeatedly brought up the fact that there's no silver bullet business model for creators in the digital age, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to make money. We've also been pointing out countless creator success stories, and virtually all of them are based on some highly original or custom-tailored approach to monetizing work. Many of those stories have been met with complaints that they aren't replicable, but that's exactly the point: without a silver bullet, every creator needs to figure out what business model works for them, not just copy what has (or hasn't) worked for others. The folks behind Made With Creative Commons are acutely aware of this idea. The book aims to catalogue a huge list of artists and creators who are successfully making a living online with their creativity while keeping their work open and shareable, and take a closer look at exactly how they are doing it. This can serve two purposes: a source of business inspiration and ideas for other creators, and a resource for open culture supporters in the ongoing debate about copyright and control. In that latter sense, it's like a more thorough version of the link-laden paragraphs you've seen us deploy here on Techdirt from time to time, whenever a successful creator is called a 'fluke':

Last month, we wrote about an initial decision by the UK High Court to take away the private copying right that allowed people to rip their own CDs. This change in law had been sought by the public for so long that by the time it finally came into practice it didn't really matter because (1) who the hell still buys CDs and (2) everyone who did already assumed that ripping those CDs was perfectly legal, because that's the only sensible way of thinking about it.

Earlier today we wrote about how the UK's High Court determined that the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers (DRIP) Act that passed a year ago, allowing the government wide leverage to get access to citizens' private data, was a violation of privacy, because it did not have necessary limitations. The rule is still allowed to be used for the next nine months while the court asks Parliament to fix the law (or for the government to appeal the ruling, which it's doing). Cue frantic bogus FUD from the press stenographers in the UK. The Telegraph's "Security Editor" posted a story with this ridiculous (and wrong) headline: "Thousands of lives at risk after High Court rules snooping powers unlawful." There is, of course, nothing in the article to support the headline, because it's not even remotely true. Considering that the law stays in place for the time being even if it were true that this power to spy on citizens was necessary (which it's not), there would be no difference at all today. But the Telegraph has to come out with FUD so it quotes unnamed government officials going with the "but think of the children!" argument:

In 1972, a guy could eat just 14 hot dogs at the Nathan's Famous hot dog eating contest and win. The highest number of hot dogs consumed since then is a nauseating impressive 69 hot dogs, but if you can eat more than 60 or so, you can still compete with the best of them. If you like hot dogs, but maybe don't want to eat more than a couple at a time, check out a few of these links.

When you assume a takedown-first posture regarding intellectual property and DMCA notices, that posture brings with it certain situations which make everyone look foolish. You get 80's music stars yanking six-second vine clips offline, for instance. Or you get radio blowhards using copyright to censor criticism online. And, of course, you get self-proclaimed representatives of aliens from the future issuing takedowns over images that said alien will be creating in said future. In each of those cases, the content was immediately taken down by the service provider, because thems the rules these days. And it sucks.

When Silicon Valley and New York City struggle to get incumbent ISPs to offer better service and faster speeds, you can only imagine the kind of broadband competition that exists in rust-belt cities like Detroit, Flint or Buffalo. But, following the lead of Google Fiber, Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert apparently hopes to do something about it. Gilbert's employed the help of a few fellow Quicken Loans employees to launch a new ISP by the name of Rocket that's going to start offering $70/month Gigabit service to a sizable chunk of Motor City.

When Silicon Valley and New York City struggle to get incumbent ISPs to offer better service and faster speeds, you can only imagine the kind of broadband competition that exists in rust-belt cities like Detroit, Flint or Buffalo. But, following the lead of Google Fiber, Quicken founder Dan Gilbert apparently hopes to do something about it. Gilbert's employed the help of a few fellow Quicken employees to launch a new ISP by the name of Rocket that's going to start offering $70/month Gigabit service to a sizable chunk of Motor City.

Right. By now you've heard about Reddit's new content moderation policy, which (in short) is basically that it will continue to ban illegal stuff, and then work hard to make "unpleasant" stuff harder to find. There is an awful lot of devil in very few details, mainly around the rather vague "I know it when I see it" standards being applied. So far, I've seen two kinds of general reactions, neither of which really make that much sense to me. You have the free speech absolutists who (incorrectly) think that a right to free speech should mean a right to bother others with their free speech. They're upset about any kind of moderation at all (though, apparently at least some are relieved that racist content won't be hidden entirely). On the flip side, there's lots and lots and lots of moralizing about how Reddit should just outright ban "bad" content.

Techdirt's very own Karl Bode had just written about Time Warner being forced to pay over $200k for robocalling a woman 153 times about an overdue balance that actually was owed by a completely different person. What with all the complaints that ISPs these days aren't forced to actually compete with one another, Comcast, in its infinite wisdom, decided to prove to the public that it will in fact directly compete with Time Warner on the battlefield of robocalling people about stuff when they shouldn't. Comcast's entry into the competition concerns the company robocalling Kia Elder about an overdue balance...that she'd already paid four years ago.

Almost everyone gets from Point A to Point B in a vehicle. This works out well for police officers looking to perform Fourth Amendment-skirting searches. The "motor vehicle exception" allows law enforcement to search the interior of vehicles without a warrant as long as probable cause exists that contraband or evidence may be hidden inside it. This exception can be extended to cover the contents of locked trunks, as well as any "containers" located inside the vehicle.

Today's deal is a Project Management Certification Bundle, which is a set of courses designed to help you get ready to take the Project Management Professional Exam. You will start with the basics and work your way through managing more challenging projects and teams. The set of six courses will be available to you for up to 2 years once you start the program and are on sale in the store for $79 (97% off of retail).

Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about how the UK Parliament rushed through a dangerous data retention bill, known as the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill, or DRIP, with little debate. As soon as it became law, challenges were filed -- and now the UK's High Court has struck down the law. As you may also recall, the rush to pass DRIP was in response to an EU Court of Justice ruling that said widespread data retention violated privacy rules. And, rather than take the hint, the UK government used it as an excuse to try to just rewrite the rules to let them continue snooping on the public.

Top Comcast Lobbyist (sorry, Chief Diversity Officer) David Cohen was a one-man disinformation firestorm during Comcast's doomed acquisition of Time Warner Cable. Cohen has a nasty habit of spearheading greasy practices -- like paying minority groups to parrot bad public policy positions to create the illusion of diverse support -- then pretending to be outraged when these connections were highlighted. Cohen also amusingly declared that those opposed to the company's merger ambitions were ignorant and unreasonable, without a single supportable fact to be shared among them.

Well this is a surprise. During nearly the entire time of the big Aereo fight over streaming TV online, there was a second player fighting battles on the side: FilmOn, by self-promotional billionaire Alki David (at times the name of FilmOn changed to mock Aereo and its investor Barry Diller, but it was originally FilmOn and eventually became FilmOn again down the road). Aereo appeared to have been constructed carefully to follow the various precedents in court cases, whereas FilmOn appeared to be designed on a whim to just get whatever attention it could. In the early days, it was little surprise that Aereo won and FilmOn lost (often badly). The arguments FilmOn's team made in court were not at all sophisticated and seemed mostly to be daring the judge to rule against them.

At the start of the year, we wrote about an important point made by Bruce Schneier and Edward Snowden concerning information asymmetry in the world of spying -- the fact that the US and the West in general have far more to lose by undermining security in an attempt to gain as much information as possible about other countries, than they have to gain. A fascinating analysis from Bloomberg indicates that this also applies to the "collect it all" mentality. The article raises the troubling possibility that both the huge OPM data breaches were not only the work of Chinese state actors, but part of a much larger plan:

The Doomsday Clock says it's 3 minutes to midnight -- the same time it was in 1949. Sure, plenty of people are saying we're not building new nuclear bombs, and we have some pieces of paper that say some countries (ahem, Iran) aren't going to build new nukes. But... tick tock. Are we really any safer from nuclear self-annihilation?

About a week ago, we wrote about Judge Mark Mahon in Florida who originally issued an order barring people from protesting outside of the courthouse if they were "questioning the integrity of the court." After it started making national news, Judge Mahon rescinded part of the order, but kept part that banned photography around the courthouse -- which was interesting given that the issue in particular had to do with a reporter for PINAC: Photography Is Not A Crime (who is now suing).

Back in December, we wrote about a ridiculous situation in Italy, where the site TripAdvisor was fined €500,000 by local regulators because it wasn't magically stopping people from posting "false reviews" on the site. As we noted at the time, it's stories like this that show why, here in the US, Section 230 of the CDA is so important. It makes it clear that you don't blame a third-party website for actions of its users. What the regulators were demanding was an impossibility. There is no realistic way for a user review site to make sure all the reviews are legit, at least not if it wants to allow user reviews, rather than hiring staff to do every review.

Last week we wrote about an incredible situation in East Texas, where Judge Rodney Gilstrap had not issued a ruling in 20 months on a filing by Newegg concerning a ridiculous jury decision. As we had noted, everything about the case was fairly ridiculous. The patent in question, 5,412,730, was ridiculous and never should have been issued in the first place. The troll who owned it, TQP, should never have been allowed to shake down hundreds of companies by claiming that anyone encrypting web traffic infringed. TQP was able to bring in $45 million in settlements from this one bogus patent alone. Newegg brought out the biggest names in encryption to point out that the patent was bogus, and also pointed out that even if the patent was valid, it clearly did not infringe. No matter, the East Texas jury still sided with the troll, because that's East Texas.

Free speech debates can often get tiresome online (for fairly obvious reasons), but it continues to astound me how people seem to think that there should be some sort of obvious exception to free speech rights for speech they don't like -- and that there won't be any unintended or dangerous consequences from simply outlawing the speech that they dislike. To me, that belief is dangerous, though obviously people should be allowed to make their arguments for it. Up in Canada -- where they don't have a First Amendment like we do here in the states -- there's a fascinating and very troubling case happening that shows the dangerous path that you go down when you start saying things like "offensive speech" should be illegal. The determination of "offensive" is incredibly subjective.

Charter Communications is desperately trying to avoid the same fate that befell Comcast's doomed acquisition of Time Warner Cable. As noted recently, Charter hired long-standing net neutrality advocate Marvin Ammori to craft its promise to adhere to (most) of the FCC's new net neutrality rules for three years, regardless of whether the rules are overturned in court. Charter's also promising to avoid the implementation of usage caps and overages during that same time period, something most ISPs are hungrily eyeing in order to protect legacy TV revenues from Internet video.

Growing up along the San Andreas fault, it was drilled into my head to be ready with emergency supplies should the "Big One" hit. The ChargeLight Flashlight and Charger might be something worth having on hand. Plug in the base to charge up the 250 lumens flashlight and you can connect a USB-charging device to it's base as well. The flashlight can also act as a portable battery pack for your devices. It's available in the Techdirt Deals Store for 23% off of retail.

Judge Alex Kozinski has long been one of the few judges willing to speak up against our nation's thoroughly corrupted justice system. It's not the normal form of corruption, where juries and judges are openly bought and sold. It's corrupted, as in bastardized. Or debased. What was set up to provide citizens with a fighting chance against accusations brought by those with vastly more power has instead become exactly the sort of system these checks and balances were meant to prevent. In many cases, prosecutions more resemble railroading than actual due process.

If you drop the search term "educational campaign" into the Techdirt search field, it's crazy how many story links pop up. When it comes to educating the public, particularly the youth, about how super-important copyright is and how goddamned terrible pirating is, the effort appears to have been going on for forty years or so. Given how every indication from our pro-copyright friends and the entertainment industries have been of the "sky is falling" variety, I would have thought that there would be some acknowledgment that the whole educational campaign thing didn't work. Or maybe that the lesson plan sucked. Some kind of recognition of failure.

Earlier this week, we wrote about a troubling move by the US State Department to "upgrade" Malaysia from a "tier 3" country to a "tier 2" country regarding human trafficking. This move came despite a near total lack of evidence of any improvement by Malaysia. In fact, just two months ago 139 mass graves were discovered for migrant workers who had been trafficked and/or held for ransom. And the US ambassador to Malaysia had publicly criticized the country for failing to tackle its massive human trafficking problem.

Well, that didn't take long. It was only a month or so ago that we brought to you the delightful news that software for monitoring the UK youth in classrooms was being recommended to comply with the UK's insane policy that conscripts teachers to watch out for scary future-Muslim-terrorists. The idea was that the software, from American company Impero Software, would report back to teachers should the children under their watchful gaze search around for terms deemed to be terrorist related. The teachers were then supposed to involve school admins, law enforcement, or parents as deemed necessary. Because, see, possible-might-be-future-terrorists sprouting up from our own children is a very scary, albeit not-yet-existing threat to something something.

Uber appears to be a company that just can't get out of the way of controversy. The week actually started out good for the company with New York announcing that Uber drivers were clearly contractors rather than employees (unlike a California labor commission ruling that went the other way). However, on Wednesday afternoon an administrative judge in California declared that the company's services should be suspended statewide for supposedly refusing to provide data that it's required to provide under a 2013 law that helped "legalize" the service (that was already widely in use at the time).

The field of modern particle physics seems like an exclusive club. Fundamental particles are literally everywhere, but it's not quite practical to observe a Higgs Boson in your kitchen. Sure, you could build your own cloud chamber and see some cosmic rays, but making your own TeV particle collider takes a bit more expertise. Maybe experimental evidence for theoretical physics is highly overrated anyway.

A federal judge has ordered the unsealing of dashcam footage depicting several Gardena (CA) police officers shooting unarmed men (one of them inadvertently). The city's representatives fought the release of this video for several reasons, none of which appear to be the actualreason: that the video contradicts statements from the involved officers.

One of the side stories over the Ferguson protests from last summer was the fact that the over-aggressive militarized police went in and arrested journalists who were covering the events in Ferguson. Two of the first journalists arrested were Ryan Reilly of Huffington Post and Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post. At the time, we highlighted how they had tweeted the lead up to their own arrests:

One of the side stories over the Ferguson protests from last summer was the fact that the over-aggressive militarized police went in and arrested journalists who were covering the events in Ferguson. Two of the first journalists arrested were Ryan Reilly of Huffington Post and Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post. At the time, we highlighted how they had tweeted the lead up to their own arrests:

Apparently we're still rather idiotically feeling out the boundaries of cell phone etiquette and common sense after decades of cellular phone experience. Last week a Broadway play attendee nonchalantly climbed on stage before a production of Hand of God to use the set's (inoperable and quite fake) power outlet. When tracked down by one news outlet, the man proudly proclaimed that he was drunk, and that he needed to charge his phone just then because "girls were calling all day. What would you do?" There's a video of said nitwit's public apology to the theater community making the rounds.

You may recall the mess a few years ago when, under pressure from the movie studios, along with Netflix and Microsoft, the W3C agreed to add DRM to HTML5. This resulted in lots of debates and reasonable anger from people who found that the idea of building DRM into HTML5 went against the idea of an open internet. And, now it appears that the organization behind the JPEG standard for images is heading down a similar path.

Benjamin Wittes, one of the NSA apologists ensconced at Lawfare, has written a long piece in defense of FBI head James Comey's assertions that there must be some way tech companies can give him what he wants without compromising the privacy and security of every non-terrorist/criminal utilizing the same broken encryption.

Today, we're highlighting the pay what you want for the Game Design Course Bundle. If you beat the average price, you will get access to all four courses in the bundle and over 114 hours of instruction. You can learn to draw and animate immersive worlds and see how addictive you can make your game with courses on gamification. As a bonus, 10% of the profits from purchases will be donated to Creative Commons.

The Authors Guild has something of a reputation for being anti-innovation, anti-technology, anti-future and anti-consumer. It's also anti-small author. And it appears to be flexing its lobbying muscle this week to make all of this clear. It starts off with a move to ask for a dangerous idea in copyright reform, asking the House Judiciary Committee to implement a "notice and staydown" provision in any revamped copyright law. Just last year we warned people that "notice and staydown" was the way in which the legacy copyright industry extremists were looking to rebrand SOPA, and it has quickly become the preferred language of those looking to expand copyright and to attack innovation online.

As everybody knows, Vladimir Putin simply adores free speech. That's made perfectly clear every time a political challenger winds up mysteriously murdered on a Moscow street, or any time his massive, manufactured troll army shouts down those critical of Russian policies on the Internet. It's made repeatedly clear in percussive fashion each and every time an outspoken journalist winds up mysteriously murdered for simply asking questions, and it's abundantly clear from the 10,000 or so websites the Russian government aggressively filters.

We've talked a few times about how UK Prime Minister David Cameron has made it abundantly clear that he wants to backdoor encryption to make sure law enforcement and intelligence agencies can read private communications. Back in January, he made it clear that the UK "must not" allow there to be any "means of communication [that] isn't possible to read [by the government]." Just a few weeks ago, he once again made it clear that there should be no "safe space" where anyone can communicate without the government being able to spy on you (that there already is the ability for two people to converse in person without being spied upon is left ignored).

If there's a primary reason for ridiculously-high cable TV prices, it's sports content generally, and ESPN specifically. On one hand, sports programming is one of the biggest reasons that people continue to pay for traditional TV. But with the slow but steady rise in cord cutting and an increase in so-called "skinny bundle" streaming services, it's pretty clear that the "worldwide leader in sports" is starting to get a little bit nervous. Cord cutting has hit segments like kids broadcasting harder than other areas, but it's increasingly clear the death of the traditional cable cash cow is headed in ESPN's direction at a pretty reasonable clip.

Politics can be tricky territory for companies and brands to wade through. While some corporations have made notorious claims on political matters, and occasionally even get behind candidates, the vast majority of companies know that they're better off endorsing nobody and nothing. As Michael Jordan once famously put it when he'd been urged by a Democratic campaign to be more politically active: "Republicans buy sneakers, too."

The US government has come up with a rather decent idea: rather than limit FOIA releases solely to the requesting party, why not release it to everyonesimultaneously? On its end, this would possibly save it the trouble of dealing with multiple requests for the same information, as well edge it closer to the ideals of the Freedom of Information Act.

School is out for most American kids right now, but that doesn't mean parents and teachers aren't still thinking about how schools could improve and how to get kids to learn better. There are plenty of problems that seem insurmountable in the US education system, but there could be some solutions that try to tackle them in limited trials. If these trials succeed, they might be expanded to more schools -- and hopefully, over time, all schools can get better and learn from each other.

Following last year's pretty good Supreme Court ruling in the Alice v. CLS Bank case, which effectively wiped out the basis of many software and business method patents by saying you couldn't get a patent on "generic" functions, there was a pretty immediate impact on patent trolling. Courts were invalidating patents based on the ruling, the US Patent and Trademark seemed more willing to reject patents based on the Alice ruling, and even trolls seemed to be admitting defeat. Uber troll Intellectual Ventures laid off a bunch of people and OG patent troll Ray Niro indicated he was moving on to more lucrative trolling opportunities, such as in trade secrets.

These days, Laura Poitras is known as the Oscar-winning director of the Ed Snowden documentary CITIZENFOUR, and with it, one of the reporters who helped break Snowden's story in the first place. Pre-Snowden, she was a not-as-widely-known-but-still-celebrated documentary filmmaker, who also got some attention after her future colleague Glenn Greenwald wrote an article about how she was detained at the border every time she flew into the country (which was frequently, as she had made a documentary, My Country, My Country, concerning the Iraq War, along with The Oath, which reported on two Yemenis who had worked with Osama bin Laden). As Greenwald wrote back in 2012:

Reddit is a prime example of the explosive growth of online communities — and recently it's become a prime test case for the huge challenges such growth brings, especially for those who are trying to use it as the foundation for a successful company. This week we discuss some of those challenges that sit at the intersection of community and business, both in terms of popular examples like Reddit and personal experiences as both members and builders of online communities. Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Reddit is a prime example of the explosive growth of online communities — and recently it's become a prime test case for the huge challenges such growth brings, especially for those who are trying to use it as the foundation for a successful company. This week we discuss some of those challenges that sit at the intersection of community and business, both in terms of popular examples like Reddit and personal experiences as both members and builders of online communities. Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Let's say you were in the market for some luxury item. Hell, let's say you wanted a nice watch. Being a watch kind-of-guy, you've done enough research to know you would like an MTM Special Ops branded watch, so you walk into a jewelry store and tell them what you want. When you ask the store clerk for an MTM watch, he or she instead points you towards lots of other watches for sale. As you look around the store, you notice none of the display cases actually contain any MTM brand watches. Have you suddenly become confused as to whether the alternative watches are in fact MTM watches?

We've discussed the "cybersecurity" bill, CISA, that's been making its way through Congress a few times, noting that it is nothing more than a surveillance expansion bill hidden in "cybersecurity" clothing. As recent revelations concerning NSA's surveillance authorities have made quite clear, CISA would really serve to massively expand the ability of the NSA (and other intelligence agencies) to do "backdoor searches" on its "upstream" collection. In short, rather than protecting any sort of security threat, this bill would actually serve to give the NSA more details on the kind of "cyber signatures" it wants to sniff through pretty much all internet traffic (that it taps into at the backbone) to collect anything it deems suspicious. It then keeps the results of this, considering it "incidental" collections of information.