The Latest Attack On Privacy: The Internet's Patriot Act, aka CISPA
Jeff Saginor writes at The American Prospect:

At its heart, the bill is a warrantless wiretap of your entire digital existence. CISPA would grant Google and Facebook carte blanche to turn over personally identifiable information they deem relevant to the national cyber-security effort directly to federal agencies. Say your computer becomes infected with spyware that you don't even realize is there--a likely scenario given the Electronic Frontier Foundation estimates that 40-90 percent of all computers have been infected at one time or another. This fact alone would authorize Comcast or Verizon or whoever you pay for the privilege of delivering Internet to log your every online movement, and share that data with the government or other private companies. Once the government's got hold of it, however, the bill further allows the sharing of that data between federal agencies and the military, a precedent-setting departure from current privacy law with the potential to create vast databases filled with the personal information of millions of American citizens. "Once that private information is in the hands of the military," Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology says, "it can be used for purposes completely unrelated to cyber security." If this sounds like the top-secret phone logging that the NSA has been carrying out with the help of major telecoms for nearly a decade, that's the point. CISPA would simply enshrine perpetual real-time spying on American citizens in law.

As Richard Forno, director of the University of Maryland Baltimore County's Graduate Cybersecurity Program explains, "even other laws that allow a company to maintain privacy, if it can be tied to cyber security under CISPA, that can be shared," Meaning CISPA would trump any state or federal privacy protections already in place. Or, as Colorado representative Jared Polis bluntly put it during the floor debate, "waive every single privacy law ever enacted in the name of cyber security."

CISPA's definition of a cyber threat is chillingly vague. The language describes any "efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy," or to "gain unauthorized access," to a computer system or network. That means virtually everything--from guessing your office's WiFi password to cracking Lockheed's top-secret network and stealing drone schematics--would fall under CISPA's jurisdiction, and would therefore be ripe for warrantless surveillance.

Rogers justifies the broad liberties his bill takes with your personal information by obfuscating his true aims. "We're talking about exchanging packets of information, zeroes and ones, if you will," he says. "So some notion that this is a horrible invasion of content reading is wrong. It is not even close to that." The trick, of course, is that the entire Internet is built on zeroes and ones. Those zeroes and ones, when strung together, tend to form patterns, sentences, pictures, mosaics of our entire digital lives. Calling that a privacy protection is like saying words are only made up of letters. Don't worry, that private email the NSA just vacuumed up? It's mostly R's and T's.