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Today's theme is Big Brother. Government has hard problems to solve. Whether it's military objectives or legal regulations, governments spend huge sums on new tech to make their jobs easier.

Some programs are scarier than others.

In the months leading up to the passage of CISPA, Google, AT&T and dozens of other companies unleashed a small army of lobbyists on the White House, Congress and the Senate. The crusade was just a fraction of the $32 million that the tech industry - which is fast becoming one of the most powerful political forces in Washington D.C. - has spent on lobbying so far this year. So how much did they spend to get CISPA passed?

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) last night by a vote of 248-168. In the days leading up to the vote, opposition lined up drummed up awareness for the bill while the groups supporting the bill steadily pushed ahead. In the end, 112 Congress members cosponsored the bill. Major technology corporations also lent support along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Did your representative support CISPA? See the list below. 

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) has been passed by the U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 248-168. 

The goal of CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act – the latest cybersecurity legislation pending in the House of Representatives – seemed so simple in the beginning: From time to time, security companies need to provide information about possible threats to government authorities so they can take action. When you write that idea down on a napkin, it makes sense. When you base legislation on what you wrote on the napkin, it becomes the next target of the Internet rights lobby.

The problem is that we live in an era when almost any system that can be exploited will be. The Internet is one example. The law is another.

The White House issued a statement today that it “strongly opposes” the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) in its current form in the House of Representatives over consumer privacy concerns. CISPA is a controversial bill in Congress designed to facilitate sharing of information between private companies and the U.S. government over supposed cybersecurity threats, such as malicious hacking and denial of services attacks. The bill has been supported by some of the major technology companies in the U.S., including Facebook, Microsoft, IBM and Intel.

Joel Kaplan, Facebook's vice president of U.S. public policy, wrote in a blog post last week that the company has "no intention" of sharing "sensitive personal information with the government in the name of protecting cybersecurity," explaining why the company is supporting CISPA but did not support SOPA, which would have required such sharing.

The question for privacy advocates is whether or not Facebook can be trusted.

Battle lines are being drawn over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (CISPA). It's a bill that would make it easier for private companies and the U.S. government to share user information concerning possible cyber threats. Microsoft, Facebook and a host of other technology companies are supporting the bill, but many digital rights groups fear that CISPA is another version of the Stop Online Privacy Act... but worse.

We stopped SOPA, but the legislative threats to the open Internet keep on coming. The latest is the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). It would give the government the ability to designate information or a user account or an individual as a "cyber threat" for doing things like leaking classified information or infringing on a copyright.

Change. We think about this word a lot. Politicians and pundits, reporters and innovators, we are obsessed with this notion of change. How social media changed the Arab Spring. How the iPhone changed the very nature of telephony. The fact of the matter is that change is not some overnight phenomenon. Effective change, the type of change that actually makes a difference, involves a series of events and often takes years to take shape. Unrelated instances become interconnected events that in turn make people take notice. When change comes, we may not even realize that it has happened.

Take the case of Simon Glik, a lawyer who was arrested in October 2007 in Boston. Glik saw a young man being arrested on Tremont Street near the Boston Common. Thinking the arrest looked forceful, Glik pulled out his cellphone and recorded the event. Minutes later, he himself was arrested and charged with illegal electronic surveillance. Today, Glik was awarded a $170,000 settlement from the City of Boston in a civil suit he had filed against the city. Neither Glik himself, nor his cell phone, were agents of change. But they were a piece of interconnected events that have been building up to change.