A cybersecurity bill that many believe poses clear dangers to digital freedom is drawing the ire of digital freedom and civil liberties groups. The legislation, the Cybersecurity Intelligence Sharing Protection Act (CISPA), should be a major story all week.

In anticipation of headlines that might be made as members of Congress propose amendments to the bill and it continues to take shape before being voted on by the House on April 23, I recorded an interview on CISPA with Trevor Timm, who is a digital freedom activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

On Wednesday, Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona renewed his push for the creation of a temporary Senate committee to investigate WikiLeaks and the hacktivist group Anonymous that would be called the Committee on Cyber Security and Electronic Intelligence Leaks.

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime & Terrorism, chaired by GOP Representative James Sensenbrunner, is holding a hearing on the “Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act” at 10 am ET. The bill might seem like something that would be free from debate, as we all should agree children do not deserve to be subjected to pornography. But, the legislation includes a “data retention” requirement that should fuel debate over rights to privacy

As you will recall, Tom Drake was belligerently prosecuted by the DOJ on trumped up espionage charges (See: here, here, here and here) and their case fell out from underneath them because they cravenly wanted to hide the facts. As a result, Drake pled guilty to about the piddliest little misdemeanor imaginable, and will be sentenced, undoubtedly, to no incarceration whatsoever, no fine and one year or less of unsupervised probation on July 15, 2011. But the entire Tom Drake matter emanated out of Drake’s attempt to internally, and properly, cooperate with a whistleblowing to the Department of Defense Inspector General.

this has gotten me thinking. If you were to talk about a country establishing a “digital insider presence” on computer networks looking to collect sensitive financial data, you could be describing this alleged hacker or … the United States’ wiretappers. And that’s even before we threaten to wiretap the SWIFT database so we can take what SWIFT won’t just give us.

Do our cyberwarriors consider it a legitimate “win” to simply delay the publication of a transnational internet operation for a week or so? At what cost? And by “cost,” I mean both the tens of millions we’re investing to develop, apparently, the capability to engage in juvenile pranks. And also the cost in credibility as a purported defender of free speech wastes its time harassing, but not preventing, the free speech of groups it doesn’t like.

Usually, the apparent purpose of hacks is fairly banal. To steal defense secrets. To profit organized crime. To embarrass a political opponent.

But a reported sophisticated hack on the IMF is far more intriguing…

We’re going to have to wait until the Canadian court releases more details on the failed extradition of Peter Alfred Adekeye to get a better sense of what the government did to piss off the court so badly. But this is my attempt to the crux of the matter.

I’m most interested in all the assumptions here, that a bunch of Chinese hackers know precisely how the White House email system works. If that’s true, why haven’t we asked the Chinese to turn over the emails OVP deleted from the first days of the Plame leak investigation? And why haven’t we asked the Chinese to turn over all those emails hidden on the RNC’s server? Maybe they can also help us find all of John Yoo’s torture emails?

Within the context of the Defense Authorization, a few points of the Department of Defense’s campaign to describe what they believe their cyberwar policy to be stick out. First, it envisions preparatory actions–basically spying on a presumably non-belligerent adversary’s infrastructure to map out how DOD would launch a cyberattack if the time came.