Today legislators in the House of Representatives will vote on HR 3525 aka CISPA amidst a small groundswell of protest from grumbling arenas of the Internet. After watching the climatic battle over SOPA, which also had extremely compelling reasons to be concerned about it, the prickling against CISPA has been extremely subdued. Part of this is due to the lack of corporate interest in stopping the legislation and a dearth of public recognition of its dangers.

“[It] is threatening the rights of people in America, and effectively rights everywhere, because what happens in America tends to affect people all over the world,” Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Internet, told the Guardian. “Even though the SOPA and PIPA acts were stopped by huge public outcry, it’s staggering how quickly the U.S. government has come back with a new, different, threat to the rights of its citizens.”

There’s a number of reasons to be concerned about CISPA as covered on SiliconANGLE last Friday in prelude to this upcoming House vote; but for a brilliant takedown of the problems that it might hand us, see an article published by Steven Hodson on Saturday:

With CISPA everything you do online, from email to blog posts, to Facebook status updates and picture posting, to Twitter status update, can be handed over to the government without your ISP, Facebook, Twitter having to notify you that there was even a request or what was handed over. In effect everything you do on the web can end up in the hands of the government and law enforcement just because they claimed the right to it under CISPA and you will never know it was done.

This one paragraph outlines the core of the problem that individual citizens should have with CISPA and outlines why corporate backlash wouldn’t happen.

Corporations such as Google, Facebook, etc. have no worries about the provisions under CISPA because they’re not forced to hand over any information to the government. This means that they’re relatively unaffected. However, the exemption from civil and criminal liability in the bill means that customers of these services cannot do anything but quit the services in protest after their confidential information has been handed over to the government.

Recent amendments to the bill narrow what government agencies can do with the information provided them by corporations and other departments—but it doesn’t narrow what information they can take. At issue here is that broad swaths of personal, confidential, and otherwise private information can be vacuumed out of social media, e-mail, and other sources under CISPA and handed over and this greatly decreases individual cybersecurity and privacy en masse.

According to Hodson, and I agree, the way we must combat bills like CISPA is going to be via grassroots campaigning not just to the legislators but to the corporations who hold our private and confidential information:

I hold out little hope that CISPA will be stopped as its predecessors were but if it is to be fought against it isn’t going to be because companies changed their minds, since there is no incentive for them to at this point. No, if there is going to be a successful fight against CISPA it once again is going to have to come from the grassroots. It’s going to have to be the loud and vocal opposition from those very people who helped create our online world. It is going to have to be the people on Reddit, and other services like that, who are going to have to once more rally the troops, bring sanity to an insane law.

It is going to have to be you and me doing more than clicking on some Like button on Facebook. Reddit may have helped us win one battle but this is a war of power over the Internet and this means we need to get involved, to be knowledgeable, to become an active participant by any means available to us.

The corporations supporting CISPA and the legislators who vote on would be best swayed by the wisdom of crowds and the strength of Internet lobbying, but it will take real communication.

As we’ve seen CISPA affects individuals much more so than it affects businesses so it will come down to the people who offer their private information to corporations and social media outfits to demand their privacy from them. Just like our government, they need to hear from their customers and clients as to what we think is acceptable—and while it’s in their self interest that they’re not held liable for bowing to warrants and subpoenas (the basic tools of the government to gather private information) it’s inappropriate for them to accept immunity for just handing over information even in violation of their own published privacy policy.

If you’d like to join the fray, take a look at the Electronic Frontier Foundatioin’s information about current opposition then bring your voice and join in.