CISA Security Bill: An F for Security But an A+ for Spying

[portlander23]

CISA Security Bill: An F for Security But an A+ for Spying
ANDY GREENSBURG
Wired

On Tuesday the bill’s authors released the full, updated text of the CISA legislation passed last week, and critics say the changes have done little to assuage their fears about wanton sharing of Americans’ private data. In fact, legal analysts say the changes actually widen the backdoor leading from private firms to intelligence agencies. “It’s a complete failure to strengthen the privacy protections of the bill,” says Robyn Greene, a policy lawyer for the Open Technology Institute, which joined a coalition of dozens of non-profits and cybersecurity experts criticizing the bill in an open letter earlier this month. “None of the [privacy-related] points we raised in our coalition letter to the committee was effectively addressed.”

The central concern of that letter was how the same data sharing meant to bolster cybersecurity for companies and the government opens massive surveillance loopholes. The bill, as worded, lets a private company share with the Department of Homeland Security any information construed as a cybersecurity threat “notwithstanding any other provision of law.” That means CISA trumps privacy laws like the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986 and the Privacy Act of 1974, which restrict eavesdropping and sharing of users’ communications. And once the DHS obtains the information, it would automatically be shared with the NSA, the Department of Defense (including Cyber Command), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In his statement excoriating CISA last week, Senator Ron Wyden—the only member of the intelligence committee to vote against the bill—agreed. He wrote that CISA not only lacks privacy protections, but that “it will have a limited impact on US cybersecurity.”

But Wyden went further than calling CISA ineffective. Citing its privacy loopholes, he questioned the fundamental intention of the legislation as it’s currently written. “If information-sharing legislation does not include adequate privacy protections then that’s not a cybersecurity bill,” he wrote. “It’s a surveillance bill by another name.”

Related:

Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul protest CISA as it advances in Senate

Despite Widespread Opposition, 'Surveillance Bill in Disguise' Takes New Step Towards Passage

[villager]

1. Hope! Change!

I imagine our Constitutional Scholar will be signing this once it clears Congress...

Though I'd really, really love to be surprised in this instance...

[portlander23]

2. Make room

Under that bus for the 83 senators that voted to advance this.

[villager]

3. Yup. Including Boxer, here in California.

Disgusting.

[Octafish]

4. 'It's a surveillance bill by another name.'

Why they want to surveil us:



The goal of wholesale surveillance, [font color="green"]as (Hannah) Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” [/font color]And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

Chris Hedges, The Last Gasp of American Democracy