But CISPA is just more bat-shit crazy stuff emanating from the House Republican caucus, which makes no more difference than the day dreams of small insects. Neither the Senate majority nor the White House is interested in it, so whatever it says hardly makes the slightest difference. Its purpose is to show potential "contributors" that if they bribe the right Congressmen, they can get anything they want, while exerting pressure on Democrats not to be "soft on cyber-security." But it's so ludicrous it isn't any good at either job,

The cyber-war lobby is very strong now, and the surveillance industrial state wants to data-mine everything in the world in order to prevent "threats," because the Cold War approach to how to conscript national resources to permanent war isn't permanent any more. This is bad for freedom, and we're going to have to struggle against it. So the general issues are of great importance. I have a course about them, called "Computers, Privacy and the Constitution" that you might find interesting.

What has no independent importance, however, is bad legislation that has no chance of passage. Solemnly analyzing such stuff is like taking seriously what is said by those various ranters on cable television. If you want to write usefully about the issues involved, taking the worst material available and writing about its drafting flaws won't get you very far: the bad details in the foreground make it harder to convey the really complex and important questions in the background. Instead of writing about CISPA, how about a draft that starts from the actual questions: how do we have security in the network for civil and governmental infrastructure that might be attacked by criminals or hostile states, without destroying the privacy and civil liberties of individuals and organizations in civil society?