The bill’s passage through the Senate was a defeat for civil liberties advocates after a round of amendments meant to strengthen a few of the bill’s privacy protections failed. “What it allows is for the companies you interact with everyday – visibly, like Facebook, or invisibly, like AT&T – to indiscriminately share private records about your interactions and activities with the government”.
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The bill establishes a process for corporations to share details of security breaches with the Department of Homeland Security following a hack, all in the name of security.
Sharing information about cyberthreats sounds great – in theory.
“CISA will bring a much-needed cybersecurity framework between the government and private sector, without granting the government any new authority to monitor or censor private networks”, said the National Association of Manufacturers. The DHS itself had even spoken against the bill saying it could derail “important privacy protections”, while tech companies argued that it should be rewritten. This legislation gives the government and US companies new voluntary collaborative tools so that they can work together against hackers that have been all too successful at stealing the personal information of millions of Americans for years. But “the lack of information isn’t a problem”. It isn’t a few user data, but all user data from as many users as the company feels like gathering the data on. A few of the recent changes to the bill-such as limiting the government’s use of the data-appeared aimed at easing those concerns.
“You aren’t going to be looking at every single letter or email that goes out”, Jaycox said.
Dropbox also expressed unease with the bill’s potential effect on user privacy.
Last week, The Guardian reported that a poll by internet activists Fight for the Future counted 22 top global tech companies in opposition to CISA, including Twitter, Wikipedia and Yelp.
One of the defeated amendments was proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat and North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican. “For me this has been a six year effort … and it hasn’t been easy because what we tried to do was strike a balance and make the bill understandable so that there would be a cooperative effort to share between companies and with the government”, Sen. Even more troubling, that information can include email, text messages and other data that can identify individuals. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., have called the legislation a surveillance bill in disguise.
However, in the end all privacy reforms were struck down and CISA was passed by a 74 to 21 vote.
But a few advocates said portions of the bill remained a concern.
One anti-CISA group, a collection of university professors from Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy objected to the plans.
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Their latest assault comes in the form of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which purports to be a way for businesses to share data on hacking threats with the government to thwart those who would do us harm.
