Budget Bill Turns Out to Be a Great Opportunity to Pass New Surveillance Legislation
[Via Kevin Drum – Mother Jones]
Congress has been trying to pass CISA for a while now. CISA is the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, and it’s designed to make it easier for private companies to share information with law enforcement about hacks and cyber attacks. It passed the Senate a couple of months ago, but there’s been some pushback in the House, so it’s been in limbo for a while.
I figure that all you really need to know about CISA is this: Dianne Feinstein is for it and Ron Wyden is against it. That would be enough for me to oppose it sight unseen. Still, what’s the problem? Well, the text of the bill seems to have a loophole: it would allow companies to share just about anything with law enforcement, including requests for surveillance of 
individuals. The fact that this could be fixed pretty easily but hasn’t been, invites obvious suspicions.
And it gets worse. CISA has now been tossed into the year-end budget bill, which means it’s going to get passed for sure. And it’s been “improved”:
The latest version of the bill appended to the omnibus legislation…creates the ability for the president to set up “portals” for agencies like the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, so that companies hand information directly to law enforcement and intelligence agencies instead of to the Department of Homeland Security. And it also changes when information shared for cybersecurity reasons can be used for law enforcement investigations. The earlier bill had only allowed that backchannel use of the data for law enforcement in cases of “imminent threats,” while the new bill requires just a “specific threat,” potentially allowing the search of the data for any specific terms regardless of timeliness.
So not only hasn’t this loophole been fixed, it’s been explicitly widened. There are other problems with this new and improved CISA too. Marcy Wheeler is reading the bill right now and posting about other changes as she comes across them. But no matter. As Wyden says, it may be a “surveillance bill by another name,” but it’s a surveillance bill that’s going to land on the president’s desk in a few days. And he’ll sign it.
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And this is how the purveyors of government surveillance, led by Dianne Feinstein, win over those fighting autocracy, led by Ron Wyden. The latter fought this before and won. But probably won’t win this time.
The leaders of authoritarian principles on the Left and Right are so easily seen, as are the leaders of democratic principles.
It was supposed to be a cybersecurity bill dealing with imminent threats. But what came out of the conference committee is much worse than what either chamber actually passed. Now it is an open surveillance bill on any specific topic, not just cybersecurity. Information goes directly to the NSA instead of at least a little oversight at the Dept. of Homeland Security. All oversight about inappropriate use of personal information has been removed.
Apparently, the Security State could ask corporations to spy on their employees for the government, collecting and turning over all data.
Now with no oversight.
This will become law and thus companies will become an integral part of the Security State.
Image: Mike Mozart
A Man With A Ph.D. 