Any discourse, by nature, creates its own tensions because of humanity’s inability to establish set meanings for terms. For that reason, we have a public duty to look specifically at legal discourse critically to understand how laws use language to define our lives. Norman Fairclough’s work in critical discourse analysis gives us a great place to begin looking at CISPA. His take on Harold Garfinkel’s analysis of social assumptions as the “common sense world of everyday life” is a beginning:
Such assumptions and expectations are implicit, backgrounded, taken for granted, not things that people consciously aware of, rarely explicitly formulated or examined or questioned. The common sense of discourse is a salient part of this picture. And the effectiveness of ideology depends to a considerable degree on it being merged with this common-sense background to discourse and other forms of social action. (77)
Taking this initial statement and applying it to the opening declaration in CISPA, Fairclough asks us to question what common sense assumptions are being made in this legislation. For one, CISPA implies that there is a threat to cybersecurity; though we know not what— nor do we get any explicit answer there. CISPA also uses the phrase “intelligence community”, which is a bit misleading. Who makes up this intelligence community? To what “entities” are they referring? I, for one, feel warm and fuzzy; surely, I am intelligent, part of a community, an entity interested in cyber security, and would most definitely want this community to share intelligence with me. But something tells me CISPA might be operating under a few common-senses that actually leave me out of said Intelligence Community. In Section II, CISPA mentions its plan to “[amend] by adding” to “Title XI of the National Security Act of 1947” by incorporating “Sec. 1104. (a) Intelligence Community Sharing of Cyber Threat Intelligence With Private Sector” (112th Congress). We note that CISPA will work off a precedent established many decades ago to further an original legal discourse. The “Declaration of Policy” in the National Security Act details a consensus on defensive strategies as policy among the Navy, Air Force and the Army (“National”). The National Security Act of 1947 defines “Intelligence Community” as follows:
(A) The Office of the