Richard Stallman: CISPA nearly abolishes people's right not to be unreasonably searched

Soon, Americans may find every private email they write could be opened, copied and inspected by government snoopers. The latest cyber security bill - called CISPA - has passed the House of Representatives, coming a step closer to becoming law. President Barack Obama has threatened to veto the act, if it goes through in the Senate. He cited civil liberty concerns as the reason for his threat. CISPA has raised a massive outcry with internet users and freedom activists, who say it's a hard hit on people's privacy. Reaction now from Dr Richard Stallman, who's President of the Free Software Foundation. He's in Tunis.

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[frecel]

I'm waiting for my solution to compile.

[ChibiBanana1]

I bet Obama will veto this just like how he did with the NDAA.

[jsebean]

In most cases how I understand (or at least assume) it is, the password is the key. However, in order for the email to be encrypted to begin with it needs to be encrypted, does that make sense? In other words, if it is the password, they need some way to know the password, so they obviously are not hashing the password but if anything, just encrypting the password which they have the encryption key to. Of course, it's all dependent on the Service provider. Some might not encrypt at all.

[TheBinray]

true, i always thought the key exchange is the mail password. but like you said we dont know i do agree the cipher key is probably sitting with them and not with us.

[jsebean]

Gentoo will not protect you from CISPA, CISPA is about third party services handing over data to the government. So, the solution is to not rely on these third party services, especially for private data and especially services based out of the US or any other country that is passing or has passed laws similar to CISPA. BTW, you should use a free Operating system, not gentoo though since it has non-free software in the kernel. Check out Trisquel, Richard Stallman himself recommends it ;)

[jsebean]

It depends on what mail service you use, some mail servers don't necessarily get encrypted. Second, just because it's encrypted, the company storing the email needs a way to decrypt it to display it to you, therefore the encryption key needs to be known to both scramble and descramble. This means, for example, Gmail, even though mail is encrypted, they can still look though the email since they have the key to decrypt it and hand it over to the government. That's what CISPA is all about.

[Michael Mcgee]

Remember, the majority of people in the united states did not want the valstaff act.It was passed any way,but was defeated by the depression.Nobody wanted the community standard ruling against hard core sex adult entertainment .It was passed .Our countries four fathers ,Greed ,Bigotry.War ,Censorship.founded this country.As a result it's being controlled by these elements.

[MCFalido]

Happy hacking.

[DeadpoolRaveDriveUSM]

Cispa must go down!!!!!!!

[Ahmed Mansour]

Hacking is playful cleverness!

[Jason Win]

CISPA is treason. I don't care its unconstitutional its against America's Law which is The Constitution. Domestic terrorism is what you call this type of act.