A secretly negotiated version of The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) has been slipped into the 2000+ page “omnibus” spending bill that Congress must pass to avoid a government shutdown. That massive bill will be voted on this THURSDAY!
ALA and many others have been fighting this bill for years.
The bill encourages private sector companies to share personal information of individuals with the government by cuting corners on privacy, oversight and legal accountability. It provides law enforcement agencies a way to get personal information without having to go to court to get a warrant. The bill waives privacy and wiretapping laws to encourage companies to monitor their own networks and excuses companies from liability for violating privacy laws except in the most extreme cases.
Senator Ron Wyden, one of the only people in Congress willing to stand up against the bill, says, “it’s a surveillance bill by another name.”
Because the vote is due THURSDAY, ALA recommends that you send a tweet to your Member of Congress asking him or her to tell Speaker Ryan that middle-of-the-night deals that give the NSA new surveillance tools have no place in the omnibus budget bill, and that it’s not too late for the Speaker to #StopCISA .
- ALA President urges Congress to reject controversial cybersecurity rider American Library Association (12/16/2015)
- Congress Drops All Pretense: Quietly Turns CISA Into A Full On Surveillance Bill by Mike Masnick. TechDirt (Tue, Dec 15th 2015).
In short: while before Congress could at least pretend that CISA was about cybersecurity, rather than surveillance, in this mad dash to get it shoved through, they’ve dropped all pretense and have stripped every last privacy protection, expanded the scope of the bill, and made it quite clear that it’s a very broad surveillance bill that can be widely used and abused by all parts of the government.
- The new US cybersecurity bill will invade your privacy, but it won’t keep you safe, by Danny Weitzner. Quartz (November 08, 2015).
Americans have always resisted the idea of an all-knowing government with centralized visibility into citizen’s lives. But CISA proposes just this kind of centralized approach to risk management.
- Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016. (December
15, 2015) [See Division N — “Cybersecurity Act OF 2015” p. 1728- ]
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