Cybersecurity comes into focus in the Senate

Time is quickly winding down in the Senate, considering how little they can get done in any given week, but there's still talk of cybersecurity legislation being considered this month. After the House passed its deeply flawed and dangerous Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), there's some momentum for the Senate to pick it up.

The bill is intended to protect critical infrastructure systems'electrical grids, electronic banking systems, transportation systems, water systems, etc.'from cyber attacks. But instead, the bill essentially turns internet users into suspects, delving in an unprecedented way into all our internet activitity. There are two flawed bills in the offing in the Senate, both featuring some of the same provisions that made CISPA so dangerous to civil liberties. The likeliest of the two to emerge, sponsored by Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-ME), is the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 (CSA).

While the CSA would actually address cybersecurity (unlike CISPA) by creating a regulatory apparatus that would implement mandatory security measures for private companies operating critical infrastructure, it also features many of the privacy and civil liberty breaches of CISPA. Because of that, two Democratic senators are sounding the alarm.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) told The Hill on Tuesday that he is "very concerned" about the impact on consumers' privacy of the White House's preferred cybersecurity bill. [...]

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) echoed Wyden's concerns in a statement provided to The Hill.

'I have serious concerns about this bill,' Franken said.  
'As written, the legislation moves aside decades of privacy laws to allow companies to freely monitor American citizens' communications and give their personal information to the federal government ' and grants companies near total immunity for doing so. While there's no question that we have to better protect ourselves from cybersecurity threats, that doesn't have to come at the expense of American citizens' civil liberties.'

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Intelligence Committee, says she is willing to work to increase privacy protections in the bill. Unlike the House bill, CSA would require companies at least try to strip that data they share with other companies and the government of personally identifiable information. But the CSA would, like CISPA, override all privacy laws, allowing the government to use information gained for any law enforcement activity, whether it had anything to do with cyber attacks or not, and notwithstanding any Fourth Amendment protections. That information could also end up with military spy agencies.

It's why the ACLU, along with the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are opposing the bill. While resolution on this is cloudy as of now, because the House is unlikely to accept a bill that has any requirement that private companies do anything to protect themselves if the government tells them to, the privacy problems with this bill have to be rejected so that they don't creep their way into any future iteration of the bill.

Contact your senators and tell them to oppose the House CISPA bill and any version of it that would gut existing privacy laws.