The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) passed the US House of Representatives on a 288-127 vote. The unsurprising move comes two days after ammendments by Representative Adam Schiff (D-California) and Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) focusing on shoring up individual privacy were rejected.
President Barack Obama has threatened to veto the legislation, should it reach his desk, because of the danger it poses to civil liberties.
The amendments would have required companies to take reasonable steps to strip personally identifiable information from data before sharing it with the government and would have prohibited companies from sharing data directly with the military.
That was apparently too much to ask in legislation intended to help the US protect itself from malicious hacking attacks by allowing and encouraging affected businesses to share information and coordinate defense strategies.
Most of the usual corporate suspects actively support CISPA. Others — most notably Google — haven’t voiced opposition to CISPA because it specifically immunizes them from being prosecuted for releasing personal information about their customers. Keenan Steiner and Bob Lannon, writing for the Sunlight Foundation’s Reporting Group, report that pro-CISPA corporate concerns have spent 140 times more money lobbying Congress for passage of the legislation than those opposed.
Mark Jaycox, a policy analyst and legislative assistant at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently summed up the problems inherent in the legislation on a Reddit “ask me anything” forum:
- Companies have new rights to monitor user actions and share data — including potentially sensitive user data — with the government without a warrant.
- CISPA overrides existing privacy law, and grants broad immunities to participating companies.
- Information provided to the federal government under CISPA would be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other state laws that could otherwise require disclosure (unless some law other than CISPA already requires its provision to the government).
- CISPA’s authors argue that the bill contains limitations on how the federal government can use and disclose information by permitting lawsuits against the government. But if a company sends information about a user that is not cyberthreat information, the government agency does not notify the user, only the company.
“CISPA is a poorly drafted bill that would provide a gaping exception to bedrock privacy law,” said Kurt Opsahl, an EFF senior staff attorney. “While we all agree that our nation needs to address pressing Internet security issues, this bill sacrifices online privacy while failing to take common-sense steps to improve security.”
Representative Mike Rogers (R-Michigan), the sponsor of the legislation in the House of Representatives, has actively and contemptibly rejected all attempts to fix or oppose the bill. But Rogers has a conflict of interest, according to Mike Masnick, writing for Techdirt:
“… Rogers’ wife, Kristi Clemens Rogers, was, until recently, the president and chief executive of Aegis LLC a ‘security’ defense contractor company, whom she helped to secure a US$10 billion (with a b) contract with the State Department. The company describes itself as ‘a leading private security company, provides government and corporate clients with a full spectrum of intelligence-led, culturally-sensitive security solutions to operational and development challenges around the world.'”
When the same legislation was proposed last year, it died of filibuster in the US Senate. Here’s hoping the same Senate has the same common sense this year.
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CISPA passes US House of Representatives (again) was originally published by ARTS & FARCES internet on Tuesday, 23 April 2013 at 8:02 AM CDT. Copyright © ARTS & FARCES LLC. All rights reserved. | ISSN: 1535-8119 | OCLC: 48219498 | Digital fingerprint: 974a89ee1284e6e92dd256bbfbef3751 (64.237.45.114)