Cybersecurity legislation slowed in the Senate

The momentum behind cybersecurity legislation is petering out, after passage in the House of the disastrous CISPA bill. Which is good news for people who enjoy their privacy and civil liberties. It's also bad news for the chairman of the committee which introduced the Senate bill, Joe Lieberman, which is always fun.

The point of cybersecurity legislation is to protect critical infrastructure information systems from hackers and potential terrorist attacks. The House approach in doing this is to gut civil liberties and privacy protections of internet users, and let the various industries off the hook by not requiring that they do anything, really, to protect themselves. The bill the House passed supercedes every other law on the books, federal and state, to protect our privacy, and gives any company that abuses your information blanket immunity. It would also push information collection and sharing far beyond the bounds of cybersecurity, to include any number of crimes. It's a disaster.

The Senate bill under consideration isn't quite as bad, though it still contains most of the privacy concerns. What it also does, though, is call for new regulation so that industries would have to step up and participate in their own protection, by complying with various standards and regulations set by the federal government. Which, of course, has Republicans screaming bloody murder. Between these two concerns, the bill is losing steam.

A chief critic of the Cybersecurity Act, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., said last week that that he has made no headway in resolving disagreements over how far the government should go to protect private networks, and which government agencies should take a lead role in cybersecurity. 'There's a fundamental philosophical difference here,' he said. [...]

On the other side of the aisle, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., worried that proposals to encourage information sharing on cyberthreats could undermine privacy and open the door to a 'dystopian' system of tracking Internet traffic for future crimes. 'These bills allow law enforcement agencies to mine Internet users personal data for evidence of acts entirely unrelated to cyber-security,' he said in a floor speech last week.
Wyden, who filibustered an anti-online piracy bill earlier this year, said he hasn't decided how far he'll go to protest the provisions in cybersecurity legislation but his opposition gives a glimpse of the headache Senate Democrats face as they try to gather votes.

Let's give them another headache in gathering those votes, and deny Lieberman his last chance to pass one more piece of legislation screwing our civil liberties. Contact your senators and tell them to oppose any version of cybersecurity legislation that would gut existing privacy laws.