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Congress snuck a surveillance bill into the federal budget last night

Weak Requirements To Remove Personal Information: Entities should be required to remove any personal information not necessary to identify a cyber threat before sharing an indicator of the threat. Lumping CISA in with the omnibus bill further reduces any chance for debate over its surveillance-friendly provisions, or a White House veto.

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Fight for the Future, a leading digital rights group that has organized fierce grassroots resistance to CISA (otherwise known as Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act) and similar bills, issued a statement saying that all eyes will be on President Barack Obama should the legislation reach his desk. “It is the most significant effort by Congress to address the cyber threat to date, and should now become law”. “Instead, the Intelligence Committees cut out the Homeland Security Committee, and engaged in a race to the bottom on privacy and operational effectiveness”, Robyn Greene, policy counsel at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute said in an email. Because it’s such a critical measure, the spending bill is nearly guaranteed to be passed and signed into law by the president, meaning so too is CISA. Under no circumstance should a portal be set up at a law enforcement agency, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or any national security agency, including the NSA, the [Office of Director of National Intelligence], or the CIA.


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The bill would affirm DHS as the lead civilian agency for receiving and disseminating cyberthreat information as well as give firms liability protections for sharing such information. The bill would make it easier for private sector companies to share user information with the government and other companies, removing privacy and liability protections in the name of better cybersecurity.


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ISPs supported the bill, but various public interest groups and a number of legislators have argued it guts privacy protections and allows government surveillance overreach.

Proponents countered that such fears are overblown, describing the exceptions as narrowly tailored and considerably slimmed down from previous iterations of the bill.

The bill brings together three different versions that passed the House and Senate earlier this year with hefty bipartisan support.

The bill also restricts the president’s privacy and civil liberties oversight board from obtaining information about covert Central Intelligence Agency operations and requires regular reports to Congress describing the numbers of foreign fighters going to and from Syria and Iraq.

Piggybacked onto the larger spending bill, the cybersecurity provision will probably pass, FBR analyst Daniel Ives told IBD.

The letter said any cybersecurity legislation attached to a “must-pass” government funding bill should include several safeguards, such as, “Clearly establishing [Department of Homeland Security] as the sole (present and future) portal for information sharing”.

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Not that we’ll know anything about what the companies do hand over: the new version also carves out an exemption in the Freedom of Information Act that prevents anyone from requesting data on the type of information requested or the amount that’s being handed over.

The NSA Headquarters in Fort Meade Maryland