Though CISPA, SOPA, and PIPA were stopped in their tracks, efforts from governments to infringe on internet freedom continue
Vanessa Del Carpio
Contributor
Everyone knows about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), the two pieces of proposed U.S. legislation that targeted online piracy and copyright infringement.
The acts were crushed after English Wikipedia, Reddit, and 7,000 other websites blacked out their web pages in protest on January 18, 2012, and congressional leaders were forced to shelve both acts indefinitely.
And internet watchdogs declared victory, rejoicing in the collective power of the people, and their ability to influence important government decisions.
At least that’s how the story goes.
Since then, CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act), another U.S. act, which would have enabled and encouraged two-way public-private information sharing between the U.S. government and private companies, was proposed and defeated.
Here in Canada, we have our own contentious piece of legislation, Bill C-30, the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, which proposes allowing police to conduct online surveillance of Canadian citizens in the name of combatting child pornography.
And now, civil liberties and privacy rights organizations are fighting an international free trade agreement, TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), which, according to OpenMedia, a grassroots organization dedicated to an open internet, would go as far as “cut[ting] off internet access for users accused of breaking copyright laws.”
Despite all their efforts, advocacy groups have failed to keep differently worded, but similarly invasive legislation from repeatedly creeping up on us.
David Ellis, a communication studies professor at York, who writes a blog called, “Life on the Broadband Internet,” says what people don’t know about these acts is that whether or not they deal with privacy or piracy, they’re part of an ongoing initiative to police the internet, which began all the way back in 1996 with the Communications Decency Act.
Ellis says these legislations are the result of groups in power, such as big content companies, law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, and political leaders, wanting to protect what they consider to be of social importance.
“These interests have the power to influence law-making whereas individual onliners don’t, except through the activities of advocacy groups,” says Ellis.
So why have we not been able to put a permanent halt on attempts to take away our freedom on the internet?
Part of the problem is while piracy is a hot-button issue in society, other aspects of internet legislation that invade our privacy are less contested. Every day, we give up personal information without giving it a second thought. Ellis says it’s a trade-off many people seem to be willing to make to be able to use Facebook or shop online.
“[These acts] seem to offer an important social benefit […] in exchange for giving up other kinds of protection that may be thought of as less important. This is very much the kind of tension we’ve seen over government activities like warrantless eavesdropping and online spying.”
Still, many people are unaware of just how much their privacy has been compromised.
“It takes a lot of work to understand your privacy rights,” says Ellis.
Further complicating public understanding of the issues are politicians grandstanding and attempting to polarize the public in the debate, like when Canadian Public Safety Minister Vic Toews made the statement that public safety critic Francis Scarpaleggia either stood with
proponents of Bill C-30 or with child pornographers.
Ellis says these kinds of political maneuvers shift the discussion away from issues that should be of greater importance to the public.
“Theft of [intellectual property] in particular has grown into a perceived threat far out of proportion to actual harms, certainly when compared to identity theft or actions that might cause physical harm to large numbers of people.”
Now, more than ever, it is important that we educate ourselves about proposed legislation that could impact our privacy and access to the web, because of the internet’s prominence in our daily lives, the way it allows us to share
information and participate in a global community.
Ellis says, “The internet is a precious tool for social, personal, economic, and cultural development that will only suffer when right-wing governments—like the one we have in Ottawa—try to impose their ideology on us about what they perceive to be internet problems, instead of offering us smart engineering ideas and a high regard for the consumer rather than corporate welfare.”
