CISPA Reached the US Senate

While people have been appalled by the recent Boston bombing, the bill known as Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act was approved by the House of Representatives and is soon going to reach the US Senate. In the meanwhile, people who are against the dangerous legislation cooperate their efforts in order to put an end to CISPA.

A few days before the House of Representatives voted on CISPA, the EFF urged people to sign a petition against the legislation (thus far, they managed to collect more than 177.000 signatures). In the meanwhile, Mike Rogers, a supporter of the devious bill, called the opponents “a 14-year-old tweeter in the basement”.

Regardless of repeated efforts to stop the bill, it was still favored by the House of Representatives, a resolution labeled as “shameful” by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In response, the famous hacker collective called Anonymous, together with a number of other portals, went black in sign of protest to the decision.

FBI Can Read E-mails without Warrant

According to recently released documents, the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG) of Federal Bureau of Investigation allows agency reading your e-mail without having a warrant.

Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union published a copy of 2012’s edition of FBI’s Guide for Federal Bureau of Investigation, which basically allows the Bureau reading your e-mail whenever it sees fit and without a warrant.

In short words, under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, better known as ECPA (a privacy law of 1986), the law enforcement agencies are able to read your e-mail before being opened by an addressee as long as a warrant exists. However, there’s a problem: once the e-mail is opened by an addressee, or hasn’t been opened within 6 months, a warrant is not needed anymore. A few months ago, the Department of Justice of the United States attended a Congressional hearing, where it admitted that ECPA needs to be revised and even offered to support ECPA’s revisions.