House brings back flawed cybersecurity bill

A few weeks ago, President Obama signed an executive order to improve cybersecurity for critical infrastructure. That order proves one thing, as the ACLU points out: defending critical infrastructure from cyber threats doesn't have include invading the privacy of Americans.

Try telling that to House Republicans, who have once again introduced cybersecurity legislation that focuses more on curtailing privacy rights than on making industry more secure from cyber attack. The Center for Democracy & Technology explains.

CISPA's flaws are two-fold: First, the bill creates a sweeping cybersecurity exception to all of our hard won privacy protections and then encourages (through grants of immunity) companies to share private Internet communications and information directly with the NSA, a military intelligence agency that operates secretly with little public accountability. Second, it allows that private information, once it is in the hands of the military, to be used for purposes completely unrelated to cybersecurity.

Just as in last year's bill, this hardly changed version of the bill would give private companies complete immunity for sharing any customer information with the government, including the military or the NSA. This is after the House Intelligence Committee heard testimony from industry groups that removing personally identifying information from the data they share would not be a burden.

CISPA as written by the House would trump all other privacy laws, all of the other protections the government has established for keeping personally identifiable and sensitive data'financial records, medical records, communication'private. Companies could share any and all of your information with the government in the name of national security, and there's nothing you could do about it. It was a bad bill last year, and it's a bad bill now.

Tell your member of Congress to scrap this bad CISPA bill.