The Senate is giving more power to the NSA, in secret. Everyone should fight it
Politicians are still trying to hand over your data behind closed doors, under the guise of 'cybersecurity' reform. Have we learned nothing?
Trevor Timm
theguardian.com, Saturday 12 July 2014 09.43 EDT
One of the most underrated benefits of Edward Snowden's leaks was how they forced the US Congress to shelve the dangerous, privacy-destroying legislation– then known as Cispa – that so many politicians had been so eager to pass under the guise of "cybersecurity". Now a version of the bill is back, and apparently its authors want to keep you in the dark about it for as long as possible.
Now it's called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa), and it is a nightmare for civil liberties. Indeed, it's unclear how this kind of law would even improve cybersecurity. The bill was marked up and modified by the Senate intelligence committee in complete secrecy this week, and only afterward was the public allowed to see many of the provisions passed under its name.
Cisa is what Senator Dianne Feinstein, the bill's chief backer and the chair of the committee, calls an "information-sharing" law that's supposed to help the government and tech and telecom companies better hand information back and forth to the government about “cyberthreat” data, such as malware. But in reality, it is written so broadly it would allow companies to hand over huge swaths of your data – including emails and other communications records – to the government with no legal process whatsoever. It would hand intelligence agencies another legal authority to potentially secretly re-interpret and exploit in private to carry out even more surveillance on the American public and citizens around the world.
Under the new provisions, your data can get handed over by the tech companies and others to the Department of Homeland Security (not exactly a civil liberties haven itself), but then it can be passed along to the nation's intelligence agencies … including the NSA. And even if you find out a company violated your privacy by handing over personal information it shouldn’t have, it would have immunity from lawsuits – as long as it acted in "good faith". It could amount to what many are calling a “backdoor wiretap”, where your personal information could end up being used for all sorts of purposes that have nothing to do with cybersecurity.But it's not just privacy advocates who should be worried: transparency also takes a huge hit under this bill. Cisa would create a brand-new exception to the Freedom of Information Act (which is already riddled with holes), all the better to ensure everything in this particular process remains secret.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/12/senate-nsa-secret-cybersecurity-information-sharing-act
= new reply since forum marked as read
k/R