Cybersecurity will be considered in the Senate next week

Don't let this happen. Stop cybersecurity now. The Senate agreed Thursday to move onto consideration of S. 3414, the revised cybersecurity bill. It will come to the floor next week.

The revisions in the bill do address most of the privacy and civil liberty concerns that were in the first draft of the bill, and it is legions better than the House-passed CISPA bill. As you may recall, the House bill says that it trumps every other privacy law in existence, it gives private companies and the government unfettered access to anyone's personal information. What's more, it gives companies complete civil and criminal blanket immunity if they do collect your data outside the bounds of law. You would have no recourse.

The Senate bill goes a long way toward correcting these problems, and has even drawn praise from the ACLU. But there are still problems, not as much with the content of the bill, but with the politics of getting a bill that continues to protect privacy while at the same creating effective cybersecurity.

That process could turn this bill back into a monster. Problem number one, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce doesn't accept the revisions. Their problem is that the bill asks private industry to do anything at all to protect itself, even though in this revision companies are not required to do anything, but could voluntarily meet standards created by government-led interagency council for various incentives, including liability protections.

If the Chamber remains opposed, its minions in the Senate will push amendments to water down the security part. That could result in a sacrifice of strong privacy protections as the Senate attempts to put teeth of any kind into the bill. The Chamber does, however, fully support the House-passed CISPA bill.

Which means the other, humongous, danger is the conference committee with the House should the Senate bill pass. The House bill is an unmitigated trainwreck. It should be entirely scrapped. But it passed and will have to be reconciled with whatever comes out of the Senate. That's not an encouraging prospect, at any level. The possibility of any part of the House CISPA bill becoming law is just too dangerous. For that reason, the Senate should scrap the cybersecurity bill and take this up again next year, forcing the House to start over.

Urge your senators to vote "No" on the cybersecurity bill, S. 3414.