IANAL; I think the term "consumer" is from the relationship with the providers. The people being protected are specifically the ones that use the service.
Congress is a black box to us. I've read the text of CISPA, and I don't think it's unreasonable, but you have to trust the people using it, and we don't. That pretty much ends the conversation.
My friend has been working as a PA in a law office that's involved in health-care legislation. We recently had a fight about Internet regulation-- copyright. He took the position that we should write good legislation before somebody else skews it in their favor. I agreed, but I thought it was premature. You write the legislation now and you risk things like nation-wide lock-in to IE6. Software takes time, and the Web's immature. Right now, it's very noisy, it's not private, it's socially chaotic, and it's not quite secure enough - online elections, anybody?
That said, the things that IT touches tend to become more open in the long run, and eventually that'll include Congress. I don't know if CISPA is a good bill, but I don't think it helps to make a cause against it either. If we care this much, we need to participate in the writing of the laws. If we can't do that, then the Web isn't ready yet, and Congress stays a black box.
> Congress is a black box to us. I've read the text of CISPA, and I don't think it's unreasonable, but you have to trust the people using it, and we don't. That pretty much ends the conversation.
Then you're totally and utterly screwed. Ordered civilization is built on trusting our civil institutions. Not necessarily individual people, but the institutions as a whole. Once that trust is evaporated, the civilization is done for. You become Bangladesh instead of America.
I don't think we're there yet. I think the impression is built more on fearing what you don't understand. But if you think we are there, that you can't trust our institutions in their capacity as institutions, then it's time to move because there is no coming back from that.
Trust in institutions, like many other quality of life metrics in the US, is slipping. It isn't 3rd world quality yet, but it's slipping down to the bottom of developed-world standards the way that health care, education, infrastructure, etc. are slipping.
As for fearing what we don't understand, perhaps it's more rejection of what we do understand. "Reasonable" laws get abused and turned against the people. As for trust, what's wrong with writing the laws to assume less trust of institutions?
> As for trust, what's wrong with writing the laws to assume less trust of institutions?
No law that has any utility can be written in a way where you can assume you don't trust the institution enforcing it. It's like writing an OS kernel assuming you can't trust ring 0 code.
That's a poor analogy. We implement trading systems without fundamental trust all the time. Letters of credit, escrow, etc. enable us to engage in commerce without forming trust relationships. Why should a legal system ask for, or deserve, more trust than a trade counterparty?
More concretely, why shouldn't judges, prosecutors, and police be bonded?
Those systems don't eliminate the need to trust, they shift trust from trade counter parties to the government that enforces the relevant agreements. The framework would crumble if e.g. we didn't trust the courts to hold escrow agents to strict fiduciary duties.
In the real world, fiduciary trust isn't trust in government, it's trust in ratings agencies. Recourse to the courts won't matter if the bank or insurer is a fraud and the money is gone.
The point is, however: There is no reason not to insist on the same guarantees for government offices. There is nothing magical about trust in government or of fallible people working for government. It can be bonded, insured, and rated like any other transaction where significant liabilities may need to be covered.
Given that laws mean whatever those in power say they mean, the test is not whether you find the text reasonable, but rather whether they can find the text to mean something you would find unreasonable.
Yes, but we live with that all the time, don't we? At a certain point, we have to just trust that it will be used as intended, and then trust that we can improve the law later if it's abused.
So you are saying we should reject out of hand any and all bills that could possibly be interpreted to mean something we haven't thought of?
Sorry for the snark, but my point is laws are always like that, and there needs to be some trust somewhere. (The system is supposed to be structured that you may trust the system, if not the books- checks and balances and whatnot) If you have nothing you can trust, you're up a crick without a paddle.
> I agreed, but I thought it was premature. You write the legislation now and you risk things like nation-wide lock-in to IE6.
I have been tossing around the notion that a lot of laws should have a built-in trial period. I haven't been able to figure out how it could work, or grasp the consequences, but a way to automatically turn off a law unless it's converted into being permanent might be nice.
The word "consumer" does appear in CISPA, but only in one paragraph, referring to "consumer terms of service or consumer licensing agreements". I don't see what's so bad about using "consumers" to refer to people who consume a particular service, though. It's not denying them personhood; it's just a way to refer to the subset of people who use a service, whereas "people" would refer to all people.
Indeed, while omitting to mention that that paraphrase also included commentary from various privacy groups. This is a common problem with political blogging, it's all tone and no substance.
As I have said before, and will almost certainly say again, words are important, the words we use to say our thoughts are the thoughts that other people will have about them. Thoughts are the intent of the message, but the words are the message.
The only use of the word 'consumer' in CISPA is in the context of the following recurring clause:
"Such term does not include the purpose of protecting a system or network from efforts to gain unauthorized access to such system or network that solely involve violations of consumer terms of service or consumer licensing agreements and do not otherwise constitute unauthorized access."
I get that people need a reason to grandstand, but can we grandstand about something more worth grandstanding about? Right now there is some big evil oil company trying to figure out how to get away with taking the cheapest measures possible to protect water resources in the course of fracking activities. There is some coal company pushing yet another iteration of the total bollocks that is "clean coal technology." Can we make noise about something like that instead? Because that's actually going to have repercussions and effect people, unlike the wholly imagined nefarious terms of CISPA.
A mixture of not understanding the article and wanting to rail on CISPA?
Where does it mention that the government views citizens as consumers? From what I understand, it says that government would have access to data about consumers, as in 'consumers/customers of private businesses'.
Anyone can misunderstand or misread something, I don't blame the author. What's irritating is how many upvotes this has and how many people have piled on.
One of my low-priority, when I find sufficient 'tuits projects for a while now has been to find and download the transcripts of Presidential speeches over the last several decades and compare the incidence of the words "citizen" versus "consumer" over time.
Like many laws, CISPA would have an effect on people who are not citizens of the U.S. That is why many laws use terms like "consumer" in the context of business, "patient" in the context of health care, or often just "person" otherwise.
Words matter; "citizen" is a more restrictive class of people than "consumer."
1776 to 1847: Citizen America.
1848 to 1932: Producer America.
1933 to 2007: Consumer America.
2008 to ???: Cosmopolitan America.
Citizen America was an experiment in rational government that succeeded with flying colors in some ways (secularism, increasing confidence in popular government) but struggled immensely with the division-of-labor question, ultimately falling into bitter conflict (then war) over slavery.
Producer America started with the Industrial Revolution (which solved division-of-labor issues) and ran through the Gilded Age, and ultimately fell apart with the Great Depression, which taught us how bad things get for everyone if people can't buy the things being produced by industry.
Consumer America started with the New Deal and Keynesian economics, reached its cultural height in the 1950s-60s, and is now unraveling because it's unsatisfying and culturally empty. Also, the foreign policy (need to justify this hyperconsumptive lifestyle in which people eat 3x as much meat and do 2x as much driving as makes sense) has been horrid, to the point that even most Americans don't support it.
Cosmopolitan America is driven by a generation of people who see themselves as global citizens and want to improve the rest of the world through organic, democratic, and compassionate means (no more "bomb 'em till they love us"). Also, it seeks to allow more people to have involvement in production. It turns out to be a very unrewarding existence to be a corporate drone whose only real contribution to life is to consume (especially as those pointless, menial jobs get cut, thanks to technology).
What we're seeing now is the conflict between Consumer vs. Cosmopolitan America.
What we're seeing now is the conflict between Consumer vs. Cosmopolitan America
Cosmopolitan America, if it exists as a mass paradigm, is at this point mostly aspirational. Our entire culture and economy revolve around consumption. Most jobs are in service, not production. It is difficult to be a citizen of the world when the world is so disunified -- see attempts to do anything of use to combat global warming.
Meanwhile, capital is doing its very best to coopt any nascent consciousness of Americans as producers rather than consumers. You can see how quickly, for instance, hipster culture, which started out as anti-consumer (thrift stores, reclaimed industrial spaces, living in the cracks of society producing art instead of having normal jobs) was commodified and turned into fashion, and people who were drawn to hipsterdom were channeled into more appropriate avenues for buying.
Each of these depends on the predecessor, so these seem to be layers. Production went way up during Consumer America. And it is not clear that Cosmopolitan America is any America ( as a distinct idea ) at all. Since it's transnational, it lacks the sort of identity that a nation-state needs. If Cosmopolitan America also means drones...
Keynes/Galbraith didn't fail so much as it was abandoned. The thing that peaked in the '50s/'60s was the large monolithic corporation ( as more in Galbraith than Keynes but still ...).
People drive too much to change land use. It's about the cost of a square foot of housing as a function of distance to where one works.
Cosmopolitan vs. Consumer sounds an awful lot like GenX/Millenial vs. Baby Boomer. It's still consumerism, it's just iPhone consumerism. I rather like Robin Hanson's "farmer/forager" model better.
Congress is a black box to us. I've read the text of CISPA, and I don't think it's unreasonable, but you have to trust the people using it, and we don't. That pretty much ends the conversation.
My friend has been working as a PA in a law office that's involved in health-care legislation. We recently had a fight about Internet regulation-- copyright. He took the position that we should write good legislation before somebody else skews it in their favor. I agreed, but I thought it was premature. You write the legislation now and you risk things like nation-wide lock-in to IE6. Software takes time, and the Web's immature. Right now, it's very noisy, it's not private, it's socially chaotic, and it's not quite secure enough - online elections, anybody?
That said, the things that IT touches tend to become more open in the long run, and eventually that'll include Congress. I don't know if CISPA is a good bill, but I don't think it helps to make a cause against it either. If we care this much, we need to participate in the writing of the laws. If we can't do that, then the Web isn't ready yet, and Congress stays a black box.
EDIT: brevity