Conservative Rumblings

The American Thinker has the disturbing facts: the Democrats are already moving to adopt a Big Brother-esque Internet “security” policy that gives the White House unprecedented power to regulate the Internet. I predicted this rise of totalitarianism, but not this soon. God help us all.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 would, for example, give the President unfettered power to shut down Internet traffic in emergencies or disconnect any critical infrastructure system or network on national security grounds. The bill would grant the Commerce Department the ability to override all privacy laws to access any information about Internet usage in connection with a new role in tracking cybersecurity threats.

The bill, introduced by Sens. John Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe, would also give the government unprecedented control over computer software and Internet services, threatening innovation, freedom and privacy. CDT President and CEO Leslie Harris said, “The cybersecurity threat is real, but such a drastic federal intervention in private communications technology and networks could harm both security and privacy.”

Full text of the bill here (.pdf): http://cdt.org/security/CYBERSEC4.pdf

This cannot be allowed. If the Democrats are allowed to pass this obscene measure, it could spell the end of the Internet as we know it in the United States. The government would be free to regulate traffic and track users in a manner eerily reminiscent to what China does to its citizens. Political dissidents can be cataloged and tracked, their every move monitored and recorded. Every day citizens will be watched as they go about their lives.

Just picture the government being able to pull up your IP address and scroll through a list of every website you visit, every word you type and every email you send. Unnerved yet? You should be; government regulation of the Internet isn’t coming…it’s here and ready to be voted on.

Hello, Big Brother. Goodbye, privacy and freedom.

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One more thing…a good point made by a reader (@Bob_Clark) from Twitter: Didn’t Liberals complain about Bush doing the same thing?

Absolutely, they did…they went nuts about the Patriot Act “stealing their rights” for years, but now we haven’t heard a whimper from them about this piece of work. Double standard? Or stupidity? I say both.

Oh, the power of the blogosphere. Only 24 hours after the company stood pat on their decision to maintain an altered TOS that removed a very important line about who owned what users uploaded, Facebook has done a smart about face and re-added the line.

Yielding to pressure from its users and privacy advocates, Facebook Inc. Tuesday night backed away from controversial changes to its terms of use that some had decried as giving the social network too much leeway with users’ personal information.

Just a day after standing by the revisions, the company said it would scrap the new policy and return to its previous terms of service in a notice to its 175 million users on its Web site.

Welcome to the new world, Facebook. You helped bring it about, and now your users are armed with a voice louder than any generation has ever had. I give the company a lot of credit for putting everything back the way it was, but this is another microcosm of the enormous strength that consumers and bloggers are now wielding. Companies no longer have to answer to the media and their stockholders; they have to answer to everyone.

Facebook has never been the biggest proponents of user’s privacy, but now they’ve gone a step further and removed a key line from their TOS.

The section about keeping your info has not changed:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

However, the devil is in the details. This section was removed:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

So now, Facebook not only owns everything, they also can continue to use it even if you quit today. I automatically import all the blogs I write here into Facebook, and now I’ll have to rethink that. If it came to it, I’d challenge the legality of this under The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 but with the new administration being hostile to privacy and personal rights and Facebook being a multi-billion dollar company, somehow I doubt it would do much good.

(hat tip: Repurblican).