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cisa
The Senate, Ignorant on Cybersecurity, Just Passed a Bill About It Anyway
Try asking the bill's sponsors how the bill will prevent cyberattacks or force companies and governments to improve their defenses. They can't answer. They will use buzzwords like "info-sharing" yet will conveniently ignore the fact that companies and the government can already share information with each other as is.
There were barely any actual cybersecurity experts who were for the bill. A large group of respected computer scientists and engineers were against it. So were cyberlaw professors. Civil liberties groups uniformly opposed (and were appalled by) the bill. So did consumer groups. So did the vast majority of giant tech companies. Yet it still sailed through the Senate, mostly because lawmakers - many of whom can barely operate their own email - know hardly anything about the technology that they're crafting legislation about.
This is the state of "cybersecurity" legislation in this country, where lawmakers wanted to do something, but lacking any sort of technical expertise - or any clue at all what to do - just decided to cede more power to intelligence agencies like the NSA. The bill, which used to be known as Cispa, has been festering in Congress for years, and now it looks like it will finally head to the President's desk.
Along the way, the Senate decided to reject a handful of common sense privacy amendments that could've protected that information. One by one, privacy and transparency amendments that would've at least made the bill less awful were voted down on Tuesday.
First, they voted down Senator Ron Wyden's amendment that would've forced companies to strip out personally identifiable information before handing data over to the government. They voted down Senator Patrick Leahy's amendment that would've prevented Cisa from carving out a new exemption to the Freedom of Information Act, which will prevent news organizations and others from using the transparency law to find out what types of information companies are handing over to the government.
In an era of secret law, where the government has no problem completely re-interpreting laws in complete secrecy to allow mass spying on Americans, we now have another law on the books that carves a hole in our privacy laws, contains vague language that can be interpreted any which way, and that has provisions inserted into it specifically to prevent us from finding out how they're using it.
Facebook Accused of Secretly Lobbying To Pass CISA
According to Fight For The Future, though the multi-billion dollar social networking site claims publicly to oppose it, Facebook is working behind the scenes to get CISA passed. In other words, Facebook is doing some things in private it does not want everyone to know about.
The value of CISA to Facebook, as Fight For The Future notes, is that the current version of the bill gives legal immunity to companies such as Facebook for violating privacy laws as long as the company shares information with the government. A get out of jail and civil lawsuit free card for a company constantly dealing with legal issues for its privacy practices.
Under CISA, as long as Facebook cuts the government in on the action it can violate user privacy and face no accountability for it, at least in the US. So it would not be a surprise if the company was trying to see CISA enacted, Facebook has a direct interest in getting the legal immunity contained in the bill.
The national security state's interest in CISA is not hard to decipher, either. If CISA becomes law, much of the domestic spying performed by the NSA and other agencies has stronger legal ground to stand on. CISA also facilitates increased collaboration between private companies with the legal immunity provision that will allow companies like Facebook, Verizon, Google, and AT&T to violate their users privacy without having to worry about legal consequences.
With no check from the users, those companies will primarily face trouble from the government for not complying with secret orders. CISA could be a fatal blow to what remains of privacy rights online.
Fight For The Future has launched a petition to ask Facebook to "come clean" on their CISA lobbying.
Despite Widespread Opposition, 'Surveillance Bill in Disguise' Takes New Step Towards Passage
"The Senate just did a really bad thing," Techdirt's Mike Masnick wrote Thursday, and offered a list of the senators he said "just voted to increase surveillance and decrease trust in our internet companies, thereby harming the American economy and innovation."
As to why the legislation, touted by its supporters as strengthening national cybersecurity, is bad, Freedom of the Press Foundation's Trevor Timm has written that CISA is "really a surveillance bill in disguise." He continues:
The main crux of the bill is to carve a giant exception into all our current privacy laws so as to allow tech companies like Google and Amazon to hand over huge amounts of our information without any legal process whatsoever, as long as they have a vague cybersecurity purpose.
But tech companies including Google are among those in the industry that have joined the chorus of those coming out against the legislation.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation further noted Thursday:
CISA is fundamentally flawed. The bill's broad immunity clauses, vague definitions, and aggressive spying powers combine to make the bill a surveillance bill in disguise. Further, the bill does not address problems from the recent highly publicized computer data breaches that were caused by unencrypted files, poor computer architecture, un-updated servers, and employees (or contractors) clicking malware links.
Among the 14 senators who voted against the bill is Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who echoed Timm's comments in stating ahead of the vote that CISA "giv[es] large corporations more liability protection and even more leeway on how to use and share our personal information with the government--without adequate privacy protections."
The American Library Association (ALA) is also among the groups against CISA, and joined dozens of civil society organizations and security experts in issuing a letter (pdf) to senators earlier this year urging them to vote against the legislation.
"When librarians oppose a bill with 'information sharing' in its name you can be sure that the bill is decidedly more than advertised," ALA president Sari Feldman stated last week, and added that CISA "could function, as a practical matter, as a new warrantless surveillance tool."
Prompted by the vote, some of the organizations against the legislation, including Fight for the Future, CODEPINK, and Restore the Fourth, staged a CISA protest on Thursday night outside the U.S. Capitol building.
"The U.S. government's deplorable surveillance programs and pathetic cybersecurity have already severely damaged the public's trust in tech companies and their members of Congress," Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future, said in a statement issued Friday.
"If they choose to ignore the blatantly overwhelming opposition to this bill and pass it anyway, that damage could become irreparable," Greer's statement continued. "This moment will go down in history, and politicians need to decide which side of history they want to be on: the side that fought for freedom or the side that gave it away."
The legislation is set for a final vote on Tuesday. The House has already passed its version of the bill.
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