On Monday, April 23, Congress voted on CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Intelligence Act, and not surprisingly, it passed easily. There were no blackouts, no social media status bombing and no protests.
But why not? It has largely the same effects of the Stop Online Piracy Act, which practically blew up the Internet this past January with protests from outraged Internet users. Even worse, CISPA operates under the guise of National Security, which should send a chill down the spine of anyone familiar with United States politics since September 11.
ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, came and went about a month ago, another law that would have had largely the same effects as SOPA.
That one, fortunately, handled itself when international support for the bill crumbled, but the fact remains that we made very little effort to do anything about it.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the Kony 2012 movement, though. That was another rare moment where our generation, catalyzed by a particularly well put together video, united as one in the face of a larger opponent.
I’ll gloss over the problems with the whole Kony 2012 campaign, and why the issue was blown immensely out of proportion. Those are worth noting, but they’re not the point here. The point is that for one, maybe two days, Kony 2012 was everywhere. I probably saw the video posted on Facebook 20 times, and it was a trending topic on Twitter. It swept through Elon, and the country, like wildfire.
And then it disappeared. Almost instantaneously, there were no more status updates, no more tweets, no evidence of any sort of change. And yet the hysteria had died down nonetheless, with no evidence of the change except a few discarded hashtags.
My point in all this is not to make anyone angry, and certainly not to criticize our handlings of these recent events. I simply want people to consider what we can do, and what we have a responsibility to do.
On January 18, we proved, as a nation and as a generation, that we could change things. We proved that we were still able to come together and unify for a cause that we all believed in, and for once, we got something done. We stopped the passing of a potentially catastrophic piece of legislature, SOPA.
In an era of unprecedented connectivity and unrestricted access to the largest stores of knowledge in human history, we have the means to cause genuine social change. We’ve proven that. But we need to act on it.
CISPA has passed. It shouldn’t have, but it did. But it should remind us all of what happens when we forget to do our civic duty, to make sure we use the immense resources at our disposal for good, for our own protection, and for the protection of those who can’t protect themselves. So stay informed. Know what’s going on in the world so you can be ready to speak out against it if necessary. Because we’ve proven that we can make a change, we just need step out of our apathy and actually decide to.